Using Resource Dominance to Explain and Predict Evolutionary Success

Abstract

In this century, evolutionary biology has been successful in using fitness as a measure for evolutionary success. Although fitness has the intuitive association of "something which is better", a restricted definition in the form of "the number of successful offspring" is often used in biology. This definition is convenient because it is, in principle, easy to count offspring. Yet, the explanatory and predictive capacity of such fitness measurements are restricted and the method is restricted in its Ise to reproducing entities. To better understand traditional fitness measurements, we suggest that more attention be paid to underlying factors. For this purpose we advocate to focus on "resource dominance". The idea is that any unit of evolution which is good at dominating the resources needed for maintenance, growth and/or reproduction will also show a high evolutionary success. We show that a high resource dominance can be reached via different strategies. Additionally, we discuss how the capacity for resource dominance is related to the complexity and efficiency of the evolving unit.