Evolutionarily Stable Versus Fitness Maximizing Life Histories under Frequency-Dependent Selection

There has been recent interest in using the techniques of quantitative genetics to study optimal life histories under frequency-dependent selection, but a search of the literature has revealed no clear quantitative genetics recursion that incorporates both frequency dependence and overlapping generations. This may be due in part to the historical tendency of life-history theory to ignore frequency dependence. Here we provide such a recursion, and use it to explore the general question of how frequency-dependent selection on life-history traits can cause the evolutionarily stable strategies to differ from the point of maximum mean fitness.