About: Evolutionary tradeoff

An evolutionary tradeoff is a situation in which evolution cannot advance one part of a biological system without distressing another part of it. In biology, and more specifically in evolutionary biology, tradeoffs refer to the process through which a trait increases in fitness at the expense of decreased fitness in another trait. A much agreed on theory on what causes evolutionary tradeoffs is that due to resources limitations (e.g. energy, habitat/space, time) the simultaneous optimization of two traits cannot be achieved. Another commonly accepted cause of evolutionary tradeoffs is that the characteristics of increasing the fitness in one trait negatively affects the fitness of another trait. This negative relationship is found in traits that are antagonistically pleiotropic (one gene