  is that it is of course often falsified. That is, there are many circumstances in which the organism of greater fitness has the propensity to leave fewer immediate offspring than the organism of lower fitness; as when for example, the larger number of a bird’s chick all die owing to the equal division of a quantity of food which would have kept a smaller number viable. More generally, as Gillespie (1977) has shown, the temporal and/or spatial variance in number of offspring may also have an important selective effect. Take a simple example from Brandon (1990). If organism \(a\) has 2 offspring each year, and organism \(b\) has 1 offspring in odd numbered years and 3 in even numbered ones, then, ceteris paribus, after ten generations there will be 512 descendants of \(a\) and 243 descendants of \(b\). The same holds if \(a\) and \(b\) are populations, and \(b\)’s offspring vary between 1 and 3 depending on location instead of period.