ABSTRACT
Life history theory is key to understanding Earth’s diverse life forms.
Indeed, schedules of survival, development, and reproduction are the
filters through which natural selection acts on species’ heritable
traits to shape fitness. Prevailing wisdom places species’ life history
strategies along a fast-slow axis of variation. Challenges to the
unicity of this axis are increasingly frequent, given proliferation of
life history databases and availability of sophisticated multivariate
statistical techniques. However, these empirical approaches often lack
concrete theoretical or hypothetical foundations. We advocate for using
standardised traits, targeting data gaps and overcoming focus on
taxonomic siloes, to facilitate a hyopthesis-driven approach in future
examination of drivers of life history variation across the whole Tree
of Life.