Wolf in sheep's clothing: model misspecification undermines tests of the neutral theory for life histories

Understanding the processes behind change in reproductive state along life-history trajectories is a salient research program in evolutionary ecology. Two processes, state dependence and heterogeneity, can drive the dynamics of change among states. Both processes can operate simultaneously, begging the difficult question of how to tease them apart in practice. The Neutral Theory for Life Histories (NTLH) holds that the bulk of variations in life-history trajectories is due to state dependence and is hence neutral: Once previous (breeding) state is taken into account, variations are mostly random. Lifetime reproductive success (LRS), the number of descendants produced over an individual's reproductive life span, has been used to infer support for NTLH in natura. Support stemmed from accurate prediction of the population-level distribution of LRS with parameters estimated from a state dependence model. We show with Monte Carlo simulations that the current reliance of NTLH on LRS predictio...

解析生活史轨迹中繁殖状态变化背后的过程，是进化生态学领域一项备受关注的核心研究课题。状态依赖与异质性这两类过程，均可驱动不同繁殖状态间的变化动态，且二者可同时发挥作用，这也引出了一个棘手的实践难题：如何在实际研究中厘清二者的效应。生活史中性理论（Neutral Theory for Life Histories, NTLH）认为，生活史轨迹中的绝大多数变异源于状态依赖，因此具有中性特征：若将过往（繁殖）状态纳入考量，剩余变异大多呈随机分布。终生繁殖成功率（Lifetime Reproductive Success, LRS）指个体在整个繁殖寿命内产生的后代总数，学界曾借助该指标在自然种群中验证生活史中性理论的合理性。这类验证的依据是：通过状态依赖模型估算的参数，能够精准预测种群水平的终生繁殖成功率分布。本研究通过蒙特卡洛（Monte Carlo）模拟表明，当前生活史中性理论对终生繁殖成功率预测的依赖……