GROWTH-RATE, POPULATION ENTROPY, AND EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS

This article shows that for evolutionary change due to mutation and natural selection there is (a) a unidirectional increase in population entropy for populations the major period of whose evolutionary history is described by a stable size or by fluctuations around some constant size; (b) a unidirectional increase in growth rate and a decrease in entropy for populations the major period of those evolutionary history is described by rapid exponential growth. These two results, which predict directional trends in entropy and growth rate for two types of evolutionary dynamics, are derived from a class of models which forges a new synthesis of demographic, ecological, and genetic processes. © 1992.