Abstract
Life historians are concerned with both the history of individuals and the history of entire lineages. A vertebrate’s various structures and their functions are constrained by that individual’s life history. Simply put, the diversity of structure and function that is evident among vertebrates is reflected in the diversity of their life histories. Each individual vertebrate’s life history is composed of its particular adaptive responses to the environment. These adaptive responses, however, are themselves limited to a set of potential responses—a set of responses that is the cumulative product of the vertebrate lineage’s evolutionary history.1
“Life histories lie at the heart of biology; no other field brings you closer to the underlying simplicities that unite and explain the diversity of living things and the complexities of their life cycles.” -S.C. Stearns
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Lombardi, J. (1998). Life Histories. In: Comparative Vertebrate Reproduction. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4937-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4937-6_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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