ArticlePLoS computational biology2015
The Mass-Longevity Triangle: Pareto Optimality and the Geometry of Life-History Trait Space.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- The exact mathematical form of the Pareto principle.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2026Article
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- Eusocial reproduction selects for longevity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- What sets the mutation rate of a cell type in an animal species?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Chronic pain is linked to a resting-state neural archetype that optimizes learning from punishments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Biomarkers of aging: from molecules and surrogates to physiology and function.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- Morphogens in the evolution of size, shape and patterning.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- Sexually dimorphic oxytocin circuits drive intragroup social conflict and aggression in wild house mice.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Tetrapod sperm length evolution in relation to body mass is shaped by multiple trade-offs.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The Relevance of Time in Biological Scaling.Biology · 2023Review
- Temperature-independent telomere lengthening with age in the long-lived human fish (Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Sex-dependent control of pheromones on social organization within groups of wild house mice.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Pareto optimality, economy-effectiveness trade-offs and ion channel degeneracy: improving population modelling for single neurons.Open biology · 2022Review
- Controls for Phylogeny and Robust Analysis in Pareto Task Inference.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Visual exploration dynamics are low-dimensional and driven by intrinsic factors.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Plasma methionine metabolic profile is associated with longevity in mammals.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Rampant False Detection of Adaptive Phenotypic Optimization by ParTI-Based Pareto Front Inference.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- p53: 800 million years of evolution and 40 years of discovery.Nature reviews. Cancer · 2020Review
- Tumour heterogeneity and the evolutionary trade-offs of cancer.Nature reviews. Cancer · 2020Review
- Tumor diversity and the trade-off between universal cancer tasks.Nature communications · 2019Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
When organisms need to perform multiple tasks they face a fundamental tradeoff: no phenotype can be optimal at all tasks. This situation was recently analyzed using Pareto optimality, showing that tradeoffs between tasks lead to phenotypes distributed on low dimensional polygons in trait space. The vertices of these polygons are archetypes--phenotypes optimal at a single task. This theory was applied to examples from animal morphology and gene expression. Here we ask whether Pareto optimality theory can apply to life history traits, which include longevity, fecundity and mass. To comprehensively explore the geometry of life history trait space, we analyze a dataset of life history traits of 2105 endothermic species. We find that, to a first approximation, life history traits fall on a triangle in log-mass log-longevity space. The vertices of the triangle suggest three archetypal strategies, exemplified by bats, shrews and whales, with specialists near the vertices and generalists in the middle of the triangle. To a second approximation, the data lies in a tetrahedron, whose extra vertex above the mass-longevity triangle suggests a fourth strategy related to carnivory. Each animal species can thus be placed in a coordinate system according to its distance from the archetypes, which may be useful for genome-scale comparative studies of mammalian aging and other biological aspects. We further demonstrate that Pareto optimality can explain a range of previous studies which found animal and plant phenotypes which lie in triangles in trait space. This study demonstrates the applicability of multi-objective optimization principles to understand life history traits and to infer archetypal strategies that suggest why some mammalian species live much longer than others of similar mass.
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