Concepts

An evolutionary process in which a population evolves to become more suited to its local environment through natural selection, resulting in higher fitness in the home environment compared to individu...

A process by which adaptive evolutionary change occurs sufficiently rapidly to counteract a decline in population size under initially unfavorable conditions

Natural selection that favors behaviors that benefit relatives, even at a cost to the individual performing the behavior

Fitness benefits that include both direct fitness (individual's own reproductive success) and indirect fitness (fitness gained by helping relatives reproduce), weighted by coefficient of relatedness

Signals that meet criteria of stimulus-class specificity and contextual independence, where alarm calls are said to be functionally referential when there is tight association between predator type an...

Limitations on evolutionary divergence imposed by genetic architecture and patterns of genetic covariation

Paedomorphosis becomes the preferred life strategy when growing conditions such as prey abundance, water temperature, and population density are poor, so individuals opt to cut losses and become sexua...

Individuals participate in seemingly altruistic behaviors because they have reciprocal relationships and take turns

Theoretical model predicting conditions under which chromosomal inversions can spread due to linkage of locally adapted alleles

The hypothesis that sexually selected traits are honest signals of individual quality because they impose a cost to the bearer

Evolved adaptations that reduce vulnerability to parasites through various mechanisms including resource specialization

Life-history strategy that reduces variance in fitness at the expense of lower mean fitness by producing multiple phenotypes

Theory predicting that if reproduction leads to increased damage accumulation, fast reproducing individuals effectively bring forward their own death, with limited resources allocated among competing ...

The effect of genes beyond the boundaries of the individual organism, including effects on associated communities

The degree to which males can control access to females, influenced by factors such as female distribution in time and space

The need for females in gynodioecious species to compensate for their loss of male function through increased female fitness

Plants and herbivores become locally adapted to one another via a local evolutionary arms race

Sexual selection model where ornamental traits indicate genetic quality or parasite resistance

Selection operating at the level of social groups rather than individuals

Hamilton's theory that fitness should be stripped of all components which can be considered as due to the individual's social environment, leaving the fitness he would express if not exposed to any of...

Theoretical framework positing natural selection simultaneously occurs at multiple levels of biological organization, and at levels other than only the gene

Random changes in allele frequencies due to sampling effects

The tendency for species to retain ancestral ecological requirements rather than evolving new ones

Correlations between boldness and an individual's willingness to face risk for food, linked to growth rate

Insects with extended parental behavior intermediate between extremely social and extremely asocial species

Theoretical framework predicting optimal investment in male versus female offspring based on relatedness asymmetries in social insects

The hypothesis that social structure influences the evolution of individually distinctive communication signals

Quantitative framework predicting that parameters influencing survival, mate encounter probability, or time available to mate affect female mating decisions

Competing advantages where hermaphrodites have higher resource demands but also reproductive assurance through self-fertilization, while females allocate resources more efficiently to seed production ...