Trade-offs
Abstract
How do organisms evolve as coordinated wholes? As noted by Charles Darwin (1859) in The Origin of Species, "The whole organism is so tied together that when slight variations in one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. This is a very important subject, most imperfectly understood." Biologists have made major advances since then, and one of the primary conceptual tools used to understand how traits evolve in a correlated fashion is the idea of trade-offs. Indeed, the concept of trade-offs underpins much of the research in evolutionary organismal biology, physiology, behavioral ecology, and functional morphology, to name just a few fields.
- Publication:
-
Current Biology
- Pub Date:
- January 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.036
- Bibcode:
- 2014CBio...24..R60G