What Prevents All Species from Evolving Toward a Survivorship Curve

question 36

Short Answer

What prevents all species from evolving toward a survivorship curve where most individuals live to old age?

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Definitions:

Empirical Rule

A statistical principle that indicates almost all values in a normal distribution lie within three standard deviations from the average.

Standard Deviation

A measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values.

Interquartile Range

The difference between the third quartile (75th percentile) and the first quartile (25th percentile), a measure of variability that indicates the spread of the middle 50% of a dataset.

Coefficient Of Variation

A standardized measure of dispersion of a probability distribution or frequency distribution, calculated as the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean, expressed as a percentage.