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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 ...
The idea of a fitness landscape is a metaphor to help explain flawed forms in evolution by natural selection, including exploits and glitches in animals like their reactions to supernormal stimuli. The idea of studying evolution by visualizing the distribution of fitness values as a kind of landscape was first introduced by Sewall Wright in ...
This is variously called "kin theory", "kin selection theory" or "inclusive fitness theory". The most obvious category of such individuals is close genetic relatives, and where these are concerned, the application of inclusive fitness theory is often more straightforwardly treated via the narrower kin selection theory. [1]
By his own account, Herbert Spencer described a concept similar to "survival of the fittest" in his 1852 "A Theory of Population". [9] He first used the phrase – after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species – in his Principles of Biology of 1864 [10] in which he drew parallels between his economic theories and Darwin's biological, evolutionary ones, writing, "This survival of ...
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 ...
Inclusive fitness in humans is the application of inclusive fitness theory to human social behaviour, relationships and cooperation. Inclusive fitness theory (and the related kin selection theory) are general theories in evolutionary biology that propose a method to understand the evolution of social behaviours in organisms. While various ideas ...
One theory suggesting a mechanism that could lead to the evolution of co-operation is the "market effect" as suggested by Noe and Hammerstein. [22] The mechanism relies on the fact that in many situations there exists a trade-off between efficiency obtaining a desired resource and the amount of resources one can actively obtain.
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]