Commentary on the life history special issue: The fast-slow continuum is not the end-game of life history evolution, human or otherwise

Salguero-Gómez, Roberto

doi:10.1016/J.EVOLHUMBEHAV.2021.03.005

Synopsis New biophysical theory and electronic databases raise the prospect of deriving fundamental rules of life, a conceptual framework for how the structures and functions of molecules, cells, and individual organisms give rise to emergent patterns and processes of ecology, evolution, and biodiversity. This framework is very general, applying across taxa of animals from 10–10 g protists to 108 g whales, and across environments from deserts and abyssal depths to rain forests and coral reefs. It has several hallmarks: (1) Energy is the ultimate limiting resource for organisms and the currency of biological fitness. (2) Most organisms are nearly equally fit, because in each generation at steady state they transfer an equal quantity of energy (˜22.4 kJ/g) and biomass (˜1 g/g) to surviving offspring. This is the equal fitness paradigm (EFP). (3) The enormous diversity of life histories is due largely to variation in metabolic rates (e.g., energy uptake and expenditure via assimilation, respiration, and production) and biological times (e.g., generation time). As in standard allometric and metabolic theory, most physiological and life history traits scale approximately as quarter-power functions of body mass, m (rates as ∼m–1/4 and times as ∼m1/4), and as exponential functions of temperature. (4) Time ismore »

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