Drivers of Diversification in Individual Life Courses.

ABSTRACT: Heterogeneity in life courses among individuals of a population influences the speed of adaptive evolutionary processes, but it is less clear how biotic and abiotic environmental fluctuations influence such heterogeneity. We investigate principal drivers of variability in sequence of stages during an individual's life in a stage-structured population. We quantify heterogeneity by measuring population entropy of a Markov chain, which computes the rate of diversification of individual life courses. Using individual data of a primate population, we show that density regulates the stage composition of the population but that its entropy and the generating moments of heterogeneity are independent of density. This lack of influence of density on heterogeneity is due to neither low year-to-year v

SUBMITTER: Hernandez-Pacheco R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5728187 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature