You can’t be good at everything. There are trade-offs. For example, a race car has advantages in the environment of a racetrack, but a jeep has advantages in the environment of a muddy, rocky road. Just as a car can be designed for speed on a racetrack or for off-roading, there are design trade-offs in biology. Understanding these trade-offs and their optimization for populations is key to understanding examples, often reported by science media, of “evolution happening before our eyes.” Key Connections between Trade-Offs and Optimality Trade-offs are necessary in multi-objective optimality. In other words, a system must be optimized over multiple variables, entailing trade-offs between separate objectives. Trade-offs are fundamentally connected to optimality because they define the constraints within Read More ›
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