Abstract
The importance of the life cycle is captured succinctly by Bonner (1965, p.3) who calls it “the central unit in biology”. He has gone on to examine many of the innumerable interesting questions that can be raised within the life cycle context. I shall consider only two issues. The first is the diversity in life cycles among both macro- and microorganisms, which prompts one to ask why such extreme variation has arisen—especially when this appears among fairly closely related taxa. The second concerns whether senescence is a property common to all life, as is generally presumed to be the case.
The “survival machines” of genes are the life cycles that link parental zygotes to progeny zygotes.
—Harper and Bell, 1979, p. 30
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Suggested Additional Reading
Bonner, J.T. 1965. Size and cycle: An essay on the structure of biology. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, N.J. The case for considering the whole life cycle, not just the adult, as the organism.
Charlesworth, B. 1980. Evolution in age-structured populations. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K. Mathematical treatment of the evolution of life histories and senescence (see esp. chapter 5 ).
Comfort, A. 1979. The biology of senescence, 3rd ed. Elsevier, N.Y. The standard treatise on senescence.
Rose, M.R. 1985. The evolution of senescence. In Evolution: Essays in honour of John Maynard Smith. P.J. Greenwood, P.H. Harvey, and M. Slatkin (eds). Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K., pp.117–128. Brief review of the nonadaptive theories.
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
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Andrews, J.H. (1991). The Life Cycle. In: Comparative Ecology of Microorganisms and Macroorganisms. Brock/Springer Series in Contemporary Bioscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3074-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3074-8_6
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