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Fitness Challenge: Too Many or Too Few

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Global Population in Transition

Abstract

Humans are living beings and share some characteristics with other living organisms. Reproduction is one of the features of life.

… Fertility is the most direct contributor to an organism’s fitness (i.e. the number of descents it produces). In fact, all other fitness components, such as mortality, only affect fitness through their effect on fertility (e.g. mortality rates affect fitness by affecting the probability of living to the next reproductive event). All else constant, any increase in fertility increases an organism’s fitness.

Kaplan and Lancaster (2003)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Genome is the complete set of hereditary traits in the haploid set of chromosomes.

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Correspondence to Jo. M. Martins .

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Martins, J.M., Guo, F., Swanson, D.A. (2018). Fitness Challenge: Too Many or Too Few. In: Global Population in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77362-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77362-9_3

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