Darwinian fitness

Abstract

The term Darwinian fitness refers to the capacity of a variant type to invade and displace the resident population in competition for available resources. Classical models of this dynamical process claim that competitive outcome is a deterministic event which is regulated by the population growth rate, called the Malthusian parameter. Recent analytic studies of the dynamics of competition in terms of diffusion processes show that growth rate predicts invasion success only in populations of infinite size. In populations of finite size, competitive outcome is a stochastic process—contingent on resource constraints—which is determined by the rate at which a population returns to its steady state condition after a random perturbation in the individual birth and death rates. This return rate, a measure of robustness or population stability, is analytically characterized by the demographic parameter, evolutionary entropy, a measure of the uncertainty in the age of the mother of a randomly chosen newborn. This article appeals to computational and numerical methods to contrast the predictive power of the Malthusian and the entropic principles. The computational analysis rejects the Malthusian model and is consistent with of the entropic principle. These studies thus provide support for the general claim that entropy is the appropriate measure of Darwinian fitness and constitutes an evolutionary parameter with broad predictive and explanatory powers.