Lecture 11: Life History Evolution (EEB 122)
This lecture systematically introduces the core tenets of life history theory, analyzing evolutionary trade-offs in age/size at maturity, offspring number/size, and lifespan. It explores how organisms reach evolutionary equilibrium in response to mortality risk and resource acquisition challenges.
Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior (EEB 122)
Life history covers three main classes of traits in organisms: age and size at maturity, number and size of offspring, and lifespan and reproductive investment. Organisms must make tradeoffs among these traits that typically cause them to come to evolutionary equilibrium at intermediate values. Life history traits are evolutionary solutions to the ecological problems of the risk of mortality and the acquisition of food, and they are expressed in reaction norms that determine the particular traits that an organism will exhibit when its genes encounter a specific environment during development.
Lecture 10: Genomic Conflict (EEB 122)
Next · Lecture 12Lecture 12: Sex Allocation (EEB 122)