Neutral theory for life histories and individual variability in fitness components.

ABSTRACT: Individuals within populations can differ substantially in their life span and their lifetime reproductive success but such realized individual variation in fitness components need not reflect underlying heritable fitness differences visible to natural selection. Even so, biologists commonly argue that large differences in fitness components are likely adaptive, resulting from and driving evolution by natural selection. To examine this argument we use unique formulas to compute exactly the variance in life span and in lifetime reproductive success among individuals with identical (genotypic) vital rates (assuming a common genotype for all individuals). Such individuals have identical fitness but vary substantially in their realized individual fitness components. We show by example that our

SUBMITTER: Steiner UK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3311353 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature