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In economics, the law of increasing costs is a principle that states that to produce an increasing amount of a good a supplier must give up greater and greater amounts of another good. The best way to look at this is to review an example of an economy that only produces two things - cars and oranges. If all the resources of the economy are put ...
Exponential growth. Exponential growth is a process that increases quantity over time at an ever-increasing rate. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change (that is, the derivative) of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential ...
Bateman's principle, in evolutionary biology, is that in most species, variability in reproductive success (or reproductive variance) is greater in males than in females. It was first proposed by Angus John Bateman (1919–1996), an English geneticist. Bateman suggested that, since males are capable of producing millions of sperm cells with ...
The cost of reproduction hypothesis posits that reproduction (and increased reproductive effort) is costly in terms of future survival and reproduction. [1] These costs may be exacerbated in certain organisms, such as first--time breeders. [2] Along with the idea that organisms are selected to maximize lifetime reproductive success, [3] this ...
Optimal foraging theory predicts that this bee will forage in a way that will maximize its hive's net yield of energy. Optimal foraging theory ( OFT) is a behavioral ecology model that helps predict how an animal behaves when searching for food. Although obtaining food provides the animal with energy, searching for and capturing the food ...
[16] For example, in a closed system where immigration and emigration does not take place, the rate of change in the number of individuals in a population can be described as: = = = =, where N is the total number of individuals in the specific experimental population being studied, B is the number of births and D is the number of deaths per ...
Kin selection is a process whereby natural selection favours a trait due to its positive effects on the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even when at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. [ 1] Kin selection can lead to the evolution of altruistic behaviour. It is related to inclusive fitness, which combines the ...
Cope's rule. Cope's rule states that lineages increase in size over evolutionary time. Juramaia was one of the earliest mammals, a basal eutherian from the Late Jurassic, no more than 10 cm long. The African bush elephant, a modern mammal, may reach a height of almost 4 metres. Cope's rule, named after American paleontologist Edward Drinker ...