 Put most generally, a life cycle is an intergenerationally replicable series of events or stages through which a living thing passes (Bonner 1993). These events or stages constitute a cycle in that they begin and end with the same event, such as the formation of a fertilized egg in sexually reproducing individuals, or the creation of a fissioned cell in clonally reproducing individuals. Development is the global name for the processes that causally mediate between these events or stages in a life cycle, with reproduction marking the transition to the creation of a new individual, the offspring of one or more parents. Although Richard Dawkins’s suspicion 