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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 ...
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of organisms have responded to natural selection or sexual selection or changed by random genetic drift across multiple generations during the history of a population or species. [2]
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]
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.
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
In this sense, an organism's fitness is determined by its changing life history traits. [6] The way in which evolutionary forces act on these life history traits serves to limit the genetic variability and heritability of the life history strategies, [4] although there are still large varieties that exist in the world.
Inclusive fitness is a conceptual framework in evolutionary biology first defined by W. D. Hamilton in 1964. [1] It is primarily used to aid the understanding of how social traits are expected to evolve in structured populations . [ 2 ]
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.