Adaptation to marginal habitats by evolution of increased phenotypic plasticity

Adaptation to Marginal Habitats

■ Abstract The ability to adapt to marginal habitats, in which survival and reproduction are initially poor, plays a crucial role in the evolution of ecological niches and species ranges. Adaptation to marginal habitats may be limited by genetic, developmental, and functional constraints, but also by consequences of demographic characteristics of marginal populations. Marginal populations are o...

Genetic adaptation counters phenotypic plasticity in experimental evolution

Phenotypic plasticity and evolution by genetic

Introduction Why revisit a 50 year old debate? Genetic assimilation is a process whereby environmentally induced phenotypic variation becomes constitutively produced (i.e. no longer requires the environmental signal for expression). Although the origins of this concept can be traced [genetic assimilation] is an interesting but, I would judge, relatively minor outcome of the [synthetic] theory' ...

Phenotypic plasticity and evolution by genetic assimilation.

In addition to considerable debate in the recent evolutionary literature about the limits of the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, there has also been theoretical and empirical interest in a variety of new and not so new concepts such as phenotypic plasticity, genetic assimilation and phenotypic accommodation. Here we consider examples of the arguments and counter-arguments that have sha...

Phenotypic plasticity and experimental evolution.

Natural or artificial selection that favors higher values of a particular trait within a given population should engender an evolutionary response that increases the mean value of the trait. For this prediction to hold, the phenotypic variance of the trait must be caused in part by additive effects of alleles segregating in the population, and also the trait must not be too strongly genetically...