Skip to main content
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1977 Jan;74(1):384–386. doi: 10.1073/pnas.74.1.384

Measures of fitness and demographic stability.

L Demetrius
PMCID: PMC393266  PMID: 264691

Abstract

The concepts of entropy and reproductive potential of a genotype were introduced in a previous paper [Demetrius, L. (1974) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 71, 4645-4647] and an analoge of the fundamental theorem of natural selection was derived. This paper relates to entropy of a population with the rate of convergence of the population to the stable age distribution. I show that (i) at maximal entropy, no oscillatory components exist and the birth sequence is unaffected by perturbations in the stable age distribution; and (ii) at zero entropy, oscillatory components occur and increase as rapidly as the real exponential component in the birth sequence. These results have implications towards (i) the relation between population fitness and adaptedness, (ii) modes of selection and the evolution of reproductive strategies, and (iii) the evolution of senescence.

Full text

PDF
384

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Demetrius L. Demographic parameters and natural selection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1974 Dec;71(12):4645–4647. doi: 10.1073/pnas.71.12.4645. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Hamilton W. D. The moulding of senescence by natural selection. J Theor Biol. 1966 Sep;12(1):12–45. doi: 10.1016/0022-5193(66)90184-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  3. Keiding N. Extinction and exponential growth in random environments. Theor Popul Biol. 1975 Aug;8(1):49–63. doi: 10.1016/0040-5809(75)90038-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  4. Lewontin R. C., Cohen D. On population growth in a randomly varying environment. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1969 Apr;62(4):1056–1060. doi: 10.1073/pnas.62.4.1056. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America are provided here courtesy of National Academy of Sciences

RESOURCES