  We explore the nature of the evolution of faint field galaxies by assuming
that the local luminosity function is not well defined. We use a non-negative
least squares technique to derive a near optimal set of local luminosity
functions for different spectral types of galaxies by fitting to the observed
optical and near-infrared counts, B-R colors, and redshift distributions for
galaxies with 15 < B < 27. We report here the results of using only traditional
luminosity evolution (ie. the photometric evolution of stars in a galaxy over
time given reasonable assumptions of the form of the star formation history for
various galaxy types), and simple galaxy reddening and find excellent fits to
the observed data to B = 27. We conclude that models more exotic than
traditional luminosity evolution are not yet required to explain existing faint
field galaxy data and thus the need for contributions by mergers or new
populations of galaxies is at least 5x less than previously estimated.

Astrophysics