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 ...

During pregnancy, littermates compete to extract maternal resources from the placenta. Unequal extraction of resources leads to developmental differences among offspring and thus within-litter variation in offspring mass. ...

In seasonal environments, precise timing of germination to match favorable environmental conditions is crucial for successful plant establishment. The timing of germination can be controlled by seed dormancy, i.e. delay ...

Whether macroevolution, that is, evolution above the population level, can be explained by micro-evolutionary processes happening at the population level remains debated. In this thesis, we tested two hypotheses concerning ...

Essays on evolvability from the perspectives of quantitative and population genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, systems biology, macroevolution, and the philosophy of science. Evolvability—the capability of ...

Delayed selfing may provide reproductive assurance for plants facing unreliable pollination environments, but may negatively affect the reproductive performance due to inbreeding depression. Furthermore, floral senescence ...

Metabolic rate (MR) often scales with body mass (BM) following a power function of the form MR=aBMb, where log(a) is the allometric intercept and b is the allometric exponent (i.e. slope on a log–log scale). The variational ...