title: Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an optimisation principle in evolution.
abstract: This paper presents a necessary condition for the existence of a numerical quantity optimised by evolution by natural selection, which also turns out to be a sufficient condition under rather general conditions. As a corollary, a related criterion with a particularly intuitive graphical interpretation in terms of pairwise invadability plots is obtained.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: Mats
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gyllenberg
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Service
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D017753:Ecosystem; D005828:Genetics, Population; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D008957:Models, Genetic; D009154:Mutation; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012641:Selection, Genetic