Critique highlights causation issues and data limitations in life history theory's application to polar bears.
While I applaud the effort that went into their article, I believe Ellis and colleagues’ two-tiered theory of life history has three problems: (1) relying on a straw man argument; (2) limitations in their data; and (3) alternate theoretical explanations for their correlations. Failure to attend to these issues resulted in a more confident presentation of their conclusions than is warranted.
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Anthony Volk (2025) studied this question.