However, it remains unclear how selection on reproductive variance, and its feedback with genetic drift, affect the reproductive biology and life history of sexual organisms.
If previous studies have established this principle, they have largely ignored fundamental aspects of sexual reproduction and therefore how selection on sex-specific reproductive variance operates.
First, our results demonstrate how phenotypic evolution can be driven by selection against reproductive variance.
In the second part of the article, we provide an illustration of how our model can be applied and study the effects of sex-specific reproductive variance on the evolution of various parental-care strategies.
Although the gradients are derivatives of the expected average number of adult offspring produced (w m m and w m f ), the direction of selection depends on how the phenotype affects the average number of juvenile offspring produced as well as reproductive variance.
The dominant males rule the reproductive roost, leading to large reproductive variance among the males, but the females do not vary much in how many offspring they produce.
Indeed, according to Low, the point of wealth is reproductive success: we seek resources so that we can accentuate our reproductive variance with respect to others.
Therefore, it is of interest to test the validity of these assumptions about age structure and reproductive variance.
Understanding speciation hinges on understanding how reproductive barriers arise between incompletely isolated populations.
While many studies have investigated how natural selection affects the expected number of offspring produced by an individual, less attention has been given to the degree to which selection acts on the variance in offspring number, or reproductive variance.
