Abstract and Keywords
The basic assumption underlying life-history theory is that natural selection has selected for an optimal combination of life-history traits that maximizes individual fitness. The best studied trade-offs include: investigating how individuals should allocate resources to reproduction versus their own growth and survival; and when reproducing, how should they divide their effort between current and future reproduction or between the number, sex, and quality of offspring. Co-ordinated evolution of all these principal life-history traits together determines the life-history strategy of the organism. The environment, in turn, determines the action of natural selection: traits may be adaptive only within reference to a particular environment and few, if any, traits are adaptive in all contexts. Life-history theory proposes that, generally, there should be no selection for living beyond one's reproductive capacity. Instead, the ‘surplus’ energy reserves which would allow post-reproductive survival are predicted to be better off spent earlier in one's life, during reproductive years.
Keywords: life-history theory, natural selection, fitness, reproduction, growth, survival, sex, offspring, environment
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.