Deducing Implications of Fitness Maximization When a Tradeoff Exists Among Alternative Currencies

Abstract

While the theory of natural selection posits that those behaviors maximizing reproductive success ("fitness") tend to survive, behavioral ecologists frequently explain observed behaviors as maximizing some "currency" on which fitness depends. A weakness of the approach is that reproductive success often depends on more than one currency and behaviors which augment one currency may reduce another. We explain how to deduce from the hypothesis of fitness maximization testable predictions. We expound the approach entirely in terms of two biological examples--a preliminary example involving flower replacement perennial and a more elaborate on involving over-winter hoarding by female mammals.