quote:
it is not generally true that many more individuals are born then can possibly survive.
I think you're mistaken here: many of the creatures in the sea, especially invertebrates, scatter thousands to millions of fertilized eggs, and all but two of these, on the average, end up as food for other sealife before they reproduce. And opossums - litters are ten to twenty, and only a pair or so make it to breeding age. Otherwise, we'd have possums up to our eyeballs. Humans were the same way, too, until agriculture and particularly until modern medicine and sanitation.
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