The huge antlers of the extinct Irish elk have invited evolutionary speculation since Darwin. In the 1970s, Stephen Jay Gould presented the first extensive data on antler size in the Irish elk and combined these with ...

To what extent within-species (static) allometries constitute a constraint on evolution is the subject of a long-standing debate in evolutionary biology. A prerequisite for the constraint hypothesis is that static allometries ...

Precise exponential scaling with size is a fundamental aspect of phenotypic variation. These allometric power laws are often invariant across taxa and have long been hypothesized to reflect developmental constraints. Here ...

Stochastic demography is essential to accurately predict how populations persist in variable environments. In age- or stage-structured populations, the long-run growth rate is negatively affected by temporal variance in ...

Patterns of phenotypic and genetic variance in thermal reaction norms allow predicting evolutionary response for a population. The ability of phenotypic traits to respond to selection depends on their genetic variance, and ...

1. Within populations variation in seed size may result from phenotypic correlation between seed size and flower size, a hypothesis originally suggested by Primack (1987). Such phenotypic correlation can be generated either ...

Climate change is expected to have pronounced effects in the Arctic, causing increased temperatures and changes in winter precipitation patterns. For instance, extreme winter rain events often result in ground ice formations ...

Theoretical models on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity predict a zone of canalization where reaction norms cross, and genetic variation is minimized in the environment a population most frequently encounter. Empirical ...

Morphological allometry refers to patterns of covariance between body parts resulting from variation in body size. Whether measured during growth (ontogenetic allometry), among individuals at similar developmental stage ...

Understanding the causes and limits of population divergence in phenotypic traits is a fundamental aim of evolutionary biology, with the potential to yield predictions of adaptation to environmental change. Reciprocal ...