Life-history traits or “fitness components”—such as age and size at maturity, fecundity and
fertility, age-specific rates of survival, and life span—are the major phenotypic determinants …

Trade‐offs are a core component of many evolutionary models, particularly those dealing
with the evolution of life histories. In the present paper, we identify four topics of key …

Researchers worldwide are repeatedly warning us against future zoonotic diseases
resulting from humankind's insurgence into natural ecosystems. The same zoonotic …

Circadian rhythms are believed to be an evolutionary adaptation to daily environmental
cycles resulting from Earth's rotation about its axis. A trait evolved through a process of …

It is often assumed that larval food stress reduces lifetime fitness regardless of the conditions
subsequently faced by adults. However, according to the environment-matching hypothesis …

Optimality models collapse the vagaries of genetics into simple trade-offs to calculate
phenotypes expected to evolve by natural selection. Optimality approaches are commonly …

Background Ayurveda represents the traditional medicine system of India. Since
mechanistic details of therapy in terms of current biology are not available in Ayurvedic …

The importance of contingency versus predictability in evolution has been a long-standing
issue, particularly the interaction between genetic background, founder effects, and …

Variations in the reproductive and survival abilities of individuals within a population are
ubiquitous in nature, key to individual fitness, and affect population dynamics, which leads to …

Recent work on selected topics of particular interest for understanding insect life-cycles is
reviewed, including habitat patterns, kinds of variation, the spreading of risk and prolonged …