"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> You are getting to a large degree into whether species move
> towards K-strategy or R-strategy (which I'm too lazy to
> go lookup now to define { I must be catching the Spike Virus }).
>From _Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge_ by
Henry C. Plotkin, 1993, Harvard University Press (paperback
edition, 269 pages; see
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674192818
p. 145
[One way] for an organism to reduce the amount of
significant change it has to deal with... is to
reduce the period of time between conception and
reproductive competence... This means that the
ratio of life-span length to numbers of offspring is
low... This is a characteristic 'life-style' of
animals known to ecologists as r-strategists...
These r-strategists usually live less than one
year...; they develop rapidly; they are usually of
small body size; and they normally reproduce over
just a single period. This is the life-history
strategy common to most invertebrate animals and
clearly one that is... relatively successful...
p. 151
In general, the kinds of animals that would evolve
intelligent adaptations are relatively long-lived
and produce relatively few offspring in their
lifetime; that is, the ratio between the length of
life and number of offspring is high. Such animals
usually develop quite slowly and have a relatively
large body size. They are what ecologists refer to
as k-strategists...
This suggests that, over the course of the entire history
of life on Earth, r-strategy came first (and is still the most
common), but a few more complex organisms invented
k-strategy (including the ones that gave rise to us).
Jim F.
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