George A. Lozano
Reseach
My work so far has included theory and empiricism in behaviour, life history, physiology, toxicology, and morphology. I have worked mostly but not exclusively with birds. By the way, when I say "I", I mean "we", and when I say "we", I really mean "they"; I just happened to be standing around nearby. The initial themes were sexual selection, foraging, and parental care, and afterwards, I became interested in research assessment, evolutionary medicine, scientific ethics, and bibliometrics. Generally, I have worked along some of the following lines.
Immunoecology and Alternative Reproductive Strategies
I did some interesting work on immunocompetence in the ruff, a species with 3 morphologically and genetically distinct types of males with different life history strategies.
We tested immune responses of satellites and independents during the breeding season (Lozano and Lank 2004), and then the non-breeding season (Lozano and Lank, 2003). Seasonal changes in immunity were best explained by energetic constraints, but during the breeding season, differences in immunity were better explained by the potential exposure to injuries. These two alternatives were tested in a subsequent study that also included the female mimicking male morph (Lozano et al. 2013). The results supported the risk-of-injury over the energetic constrains hypothesis, and placed female mimics in an immunological spectrum between independents and satellites.
Another paper, with Albert Ros, is a comprehensive review of studies on immunoecology in species with alternative reproductive strategies and tactics.
Collaborators: Drs. David B. Lank, Albert Ros, and Brianne Addison.
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Research Assessment, Policy, and Ethics
Like most scientists, I am often confused and mystified by the decisions of hiring and granting committees. Unlike most scientists, I decided to put my thoughts on paper.
The “impact per dollar” paper is a cost-benefit analysis, the money spent producing science, the benefits as best we can measure them, and how research policies could maximize the cost-effectiveness of our taxes.
The “death of the impact factor” paper arose from a simple observation: now we read papers, not journals. The implication was that the relationship between paper and journal quality had to be weakening. It turns out to be right. A follow-up paper is based on the same logic but looks only at elite journals over the past 20 years.
Other papers on multi-authorship are essentially studies on resource partitioning. The first one addresses the fact that in the current system, the cost to adding more authors to a paper are negligible, but being added as an author has tangible benefits. The second one addresses the problem of ghost authorship that occurs when internet services are used to "correct", or actually co-write, heavily multi-authored papers. The third one (in limbo) demonstrates that authorship is hard-fought when revenues are divided among authors, but readily gifted when there are no financial consequences.
Judging by the excitement these papers generated, it is clear that your average evolutionary ecologist has much to contribute to other, seemingly disparate areas of research.
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Collaborators: Drs. Vincent Larivière and Yves Gingras.
Evolutionary medicine, obesity, and anorexia
Traditional medicine and evolutionary medicine work at different levels. Evolutionary explanations are generally more applicable to population-level issues and generally they cannot explain why any one individual develops a disease, nor can they lead to individualized treatments. However, evolutionary thinking can be highly relevant when humans interact with rapidly evolving pathogens.
For example, most evolutionary biologists probably knew that a highly transmissible but low pathogenicity version of covid-19 would soon evolve (the Omicron variant), and that it would end up inoculating nearly everyone, making mRNA vaccines and our panic pointless. However, with some exceptions, few of us spoke up.
In addition to a paper explaining how evolutionary hypotheses apply to medicine, I have contributed a hypothesis about anorexia nervosa, a paper on whether variability of food supplies leads to problems of weight regulation in humans, one on the expectations and complications related to bariatric surgery, and a paper suggesting that sex differences in emotivity evolved to signal maturity in men and youth in women.
Carotenoids, Immunity, and sexual selection
Sometime during the second year at McGill, I attended a talk by Gerry Fitzgerald. It was on stickleback aggression and the role of their carotenoid-dependent red coloration. I will have to check my logs to get the exact details. During question period, someone, probably Don Kramer, asked whether carotenoids had any physiological roles. Fitzgerald openly said he did not know. I decided to find out.
​ It turns out that carotenoids did have plenty of well-known physiological functions. I realized the ecological and evolutionary implications, wondered why they had been ignored, and dropped my thesis for a few months to write a paper. It was rejected by three journals before being accepted by Oikos. I did not know what I was talking about, so it has taken dozens of Ph.D. theses and entire research programs by the field's most respected researchers over a quarter of a century to sort it all out. It turns out I was mostly right. I wrote one more paper on the topic but I never had the opportunity to do any empirical work on the idea. Actually, I think working too much on your own idea is not really "fair play".
