Year: 2022

PREDICTIVE EVOLUTION. "Can development be organised to facilitate future adaptation? That is, can evolution ‘predict’ or ‘anticipate’ what developmental organisations will enable adaptive variation in new environments that it has not yet been exposed to?" http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION. "Conversely, if all it does is find organisations that are fit over the set of past environments, then that seems to be conventional evolution, not the evolution of evolvability." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

ECOSYSTEM EVOLUTION. "Can an ecosystem be organised ‘for’ anything if it is not an evolutionary unit? That is, how can natural selection at the level of individuals within multiple species result in ecological organisations that are self-supporting at the system level (homeostasis), or indeed, result in any kind of ‘ecosystem evolution’ that is more than the sum of the evolution of the parts?" http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

ANTICIPATORY EVOLUTION. "Can evolution at one level of organisation favour the creation of heritable evolutionary units that are adaptive at a higher-level of organisation? That is, can the evolution of reproductive organisations find new heritable units that are suitable for responding to selection at the higher level of organisation before that level of organisation exists?" http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

NO ANTICIPATORY EVOLUTION EXISTS? "In each case, the conventional answer seems to be—it cannot. It is not possible for evolution by natural selection to produce adaptations for an environment it has not yet encountered, to produce organisation at the system level without selection at the system level, or to create new units that are adaptive for a level of selection that does not yet exist." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

ANTICIPATORY CONDITIONS. "We present the case that all of these behaviours that seem impossible for evolutionary systems are possible, and that necessary and sufficient conditions can be characterised." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11692-015-9358-z View in LinkedIn

PARENTAL GENETIC CLUES. "The evolution of adaptive phenotypic plasticity relies on the presence of cues that enable organisms to adjust their phenotype to match local conditions. Although mostly studied with respect to nonsocial cues, it is also possible that parents transmit information about the environment to their offspring." https://lnkd.in/djhmkSP View in LinkedIn

"EXAMPLES of adaptive transgenerational plasticity include the effect of maternal environment on the timing of seed germination and predator-induced maternal effects on offspring morphology." https://lnkd.in/djhmkSP View in LinkedIn

DATA THIN. "Of the 58 studies included in this paper, only seven provided data or cited papers with data that demonstrated environmental autocorrelation between generations. Thus, the extent to which the parental phenotype is likely to provide a cue is surprisingly poorly understood in the maternal effects literature, which substantially weakens inference of adaptive function." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12212/full View in LinkedIn

RARE AND SUBTLE. "Thus, despite some undeniable empirical examples, the quantitative evidence from this meta-analysis suggests that this form of adaptive plasticity may be quite rare in natural systems, that the effect is much more subtle than typically assumed or that it is common yet existing studies have failed to demonstrate its existence." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12212/full View in LinkedIn