Evolutionary Trade-Offs, Pareto Optimality, and the Geometry of Phenotype Space

Managing Trade-Offs Most organisms experience selection on a host of traits to determine their likelihood to succeed evolutionarily. However, specific traits may experience trade-offs in determining an organism's optimal phenotype. Shoval et al. (p. 1157 ; see the Perspective by Noor and Milo ) relate physical traits to the task that they are optimizing using a Pareto curve, a power law probability distribution, to show that a single set of trait values optimizes performance at a given task and that performance decreases as an organism's phenotype moves away from this set of trait values. The results suggest how selection makes the best trade-offs for an arbitrary number of tasks and traits and may explain examples of evolutionary variation.