Despite considerable current interest in biological invasions, the common life-history characteristics of successful invaders remain elusive. The widely held hypothesis that successful invaders have high reproductive rates has received little empirical support; however, alternative possibilities are seldom considered. Combining a global comparative analysis of avian introductions (>2700 events)...

We present an individual-based model that uses artificial evolution to predict fit behavior and life-history traits on the basis of environmental data and organism physiology. Our main purpose is to investigate whether artificial evolution is a suitable tool for studying life history and behavior of real biological organisms. The evolutionary adaptation is founded on a genetic algorithm that se...

Just as modern economies undergo periods of boom and bust, human ancestors experienced cycles of abundance and famine. Is the adaptive response when resources become scarce to save for the future or to spend money on immediate gains? Drawing on life-history theory, we propose that people’s responses to resource scarcity depend on the harshness of their early-life environment, as reflected by ch...

A female North Pacific Giant Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) lives three to four years; it lays thousands of eggs in a single bout and then dies. By contrast, a mature Coast Redwood Tree (Sequoia sempervirens) lives for many hundreds of years and produces millions of seeds each year (Figure 1). As these two examples illustrate, organisms differ dramatically in how they develop, the time they ta...

Plants use their roots to forage for nutrients in heterogeneous soil environments, but different plant species vastly differ in the intensity of foraging they perform. This diversity suggests the existence of constraints on foraging at the species level. We therefore examined the relationships between the intensity of root foraging and plant body traits across species in order to estimate the d...

Neochromosomes are a little-studied class of chromosome-scale mutations that drive some cancers. By sequencing isolated neochromosomes from liposarcomas, we recently defined their structure at single-nucleotide resolution and proposed a model for their life history. Here, we summarize that work, highlighting significant aspects and providing historical context and insight into the discovery pro...

Skeletal histology supports the hypothesis that primate life histories are regulated by a neuroendocrine rhythm, the Havers-Halberg Oscillation (HHO). Interestingly, subfossil lemurs are outliers in HHO scaling relationships that have been discovered for haplorhine primates and other mammals. We present new data to determine whether these species represent the general lemur or strepsirrhine con...

■ Born in Indonesia in 1930, as a small child I already exhibited an interest in animals, perhaps stimulated by my first conscious observation. When I was 3 or 4 years old our gardener unearthed a nest of young black snakes, then told me to leave. So at my 6th birthday my parents presented me with Huey’s book De dierenwereld in een notedop 1935. This book became my bible and determined my futur...

Dispersal distances overestimate the gene-flow scale l (the square-root of the mean squared distance travelled from birth to reproduction) when egg laying is concentrated early in dispersal and when there is mortality during dispersal. If egg laying follows a square-root normal distribution in time, as it does in several Drosophila species, then l is reduced to about 0.6 of that estimated from ...

In this article, I outline a general framework for the evolutionary analysis of mental disorders based on the concepts of life history theory. I synthesize and extend a large body of work showing that individual differences in life history strategy set the stage for the development of psychopathology. My analysis centers on the novel distinction between fast spectrum and slow spectrum disorders...