ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN QUANTITATIVE GENETIC AND ESS MODELS.

Abstract

Two recent articles in this journal have discussed relationship between quantitative genetic models and evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) models of evolution of continuous traits. Charlesworth (1990) compared equilibrium conditions produced by two approaches, and concluded that these were approximately same, provided that, the functional relationship between fitness and (the characters) is not too strongly curvilinear, and phenotypic variances of (the characters) are sufficiently small (Charlesworth 1990, p. 523). More recently, Taper and Case (1992) examined quantitative genetic and ESS models of evolution of competitors. They reached essentially same conclusion about equilibrium conditions. However, they also pointed out that dynamics of quantitative genetic model could be approximated by a simpler (ESS) model, provided selection was weak and phenotypic variance was sufficiently small. A similar result was shown in appendix of Iwasa et al. (1991). The quantitative genetic and ESS models of trait dynamics, which Taper and Case ( 1992) compared, both predict change in mean of character over one generation: