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Fitness is often defined as a propensity or probability, rather than the actual number of offspring. For example, according to Maynard Smith, "Fitness is a property, not of an individual, but of a class of individuals—for example homozygous for allele A at a particular locus. Thus the phrase 'expected number of offspring' means the average ...
It also uses measures of evolutionary fitness to determine if organisms are able to maximize or optimize this fitness, [9] by allocating resources to a range of different demands throughout the organism's life. [1] It serves as a method to investigate further the "many layers of complexity of organisms and their worlds". [10]
Fecundity selection, also known as fertility selection, is the fitness advantage resulting from selection on traits that increases the number of offspring (i.e. fecundity). [1] Charles Darwin formulated the theory of fecundity selection between 1871 and 1874 to explain the widespread evolution of female-biased sexual size dimorphism (SSD ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth.
In evolutionary biology, fitness landscapes or adaptive landscapes (types of evolutionary landscapes) are used to visualize the relationship between genotypes and reproductive success. It is assumed that every genotype has a well-defined replication rate (often referred to as fitness). This fitness is the height of the landscape.
One of the traits that helped make the dinosaurs such an evolutionary success story - thriving for 165 million years - was their fast growth rate, from massive meat-eaters like Tyrannosaurus to ...
In biology, evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. Biological populations evolve through genetic changes that correspond to changes in the organisms ' observable traits .