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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 ...
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.
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, an evolutionary tradeoff is a situation in which evolution cannot advance one part of a biological system without distressing another part of it. In this context, tradeoffs refer to the process through which a trait increases in fitness at the expense of decreased fitness in another trait.
In evolutionary biology, inclusive fitness is one of two metrics of evolutionary success as defined by W. D. Hamilton in 1964: . Personal fitness is the number of offspring that an individual begets (regardless of who rescues/rears/supports them)
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 ...
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness.
Selection coefficient, usually denoted by the letter s, is a measure used in population genetics to quantify the relative fitness of a genotype compared to other genotypes. . Selection coefficients are central to the quantitative description of evolution, since fitness differences determine the change in genotype frequencies attributable to selecti