Tautology and Natural Selection

When you say with respect to peers do you mean 'Are there variations of r and K strategy within species?'?

You really are turning into Syamsu now Peter, you have just started an argument based on a fictional hypothetical population specifically tailored to suit your point but completely divorced from anything which actually exists in the real world.How can you show that the fitness in your population is related to the genetic variation rather than anything else, given their incapacity to breed?

There are some interesting studies on the links between longevity and fecundity in drosophila, of course, and some other animals. There was an interesting review of work on guppies in high and low predator environments by a fellow called Reznick and others. Sadly my computer refuses to cut and paste in Mozilla anymore so I cant give you all the details of the reference, but a pubmed search for 'Reznick' and 'guppy' should bring it up.

But who is trying to eliminate survival? We all know, I should hope, that fitness can have a number of measures all of which are applicable in different situations.There is a page on the university of Indiana's bio web site that has a good list of a number of factors which 'multiply' together to give total fitness. They include number of offspring per mating/ season, number of matings which might produce offspring, survival in each season, lifespan and other possible factors which aren't covered, but basically anything contributing to reproductive success for the lifetime of the organism.

A lot of definitions refer to changes in allele frequency over generations, why don't you just use that instead of 'over time'. In fact in most evolutionary genetic analysis the time is measured in generations, therefore your immortal population, how ever long lived, would only constitute one point on the time axis.[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 08-05-2003]

Well as long as you are consistent it shouldn't really matter.This would only really become a problem with animals with many breeding cycles, or like humans where there is no seasonality to mating. The older population members have to die out some time anyway, except in your hypothetical immortal population of course.The best time to assess would probably be just prior to or subsequent to the first mating season of that generation, when the offspring have reached sexual maturity.[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 08-05-2003]

There are any number of ways to do it, that would be one of them, and it would let you measure all of the individuals of that generation that had survived to mating age, but exclude older individuals from previous generations.Alternatively, and most easily, as Mammuthus has pointed out you simply do what you can of the entire population. Obviously you have to tailor your approach to what you are studying, large sea mammals are going to be a very different problem than an insect species with a very limited breeding period and lifespan.Really you are choosing an arbitrary method which best fits your particular study, any reasonable sampling strategy shouldn't affect your results too much, especially if you can repeat them to even out any oddities.

As I pointed out what would be appropriate would vary, I don't see what advantage there is in trying to pinpoint where I personally would measure an indeterminate population of things. In my original suggestion I meant all the animals which had reached mating age.Given a population observed closely enough there is no reason why you couldn't tell which males had mated, and if you had enough information you could even tell which male was successfull out of several which mated with one female, obviously this would be an awful lot of analysis just for that though.