Abstract
It is almost axiomatic in the study of natural selection that fitness functions often exhibit intermediate optima (Endler 1986), i.e. selection is stabilizing or normalizing, or what I shall call here optimizing, and that the optimum varies between generations. This form of selection has been studied in many interesting systems, for example reproductive effort (Schaffer 1974; Hastings and Caswell 1979; Bulmer 1985), the timing of seed germination (Cohen 1966; Bulmer 1984; Venable and Brown 1988) and flowering in plants (Cohen 1971; King and Roughgarden 1982), dormancy in arthropods (Cohen 1970; Taylor 1986a, b), and clutch size in birds (Boyce and Perrins 1987).
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© 1990 Springer-Verlag London Limited
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Taylor, F. (1990). Testing Hypotheses About the Evolution of the Mean Phenotype in Temporally Variable Environments. In: Gilbert, F. (eds) Insect Life Cycles. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3464-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3464-0_11
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