The Potential for Rapid Evolution under Anthropogenic Climate Change

Abstract

Understanding how natural populations will respond to rapid anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest challenges for ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Much research has focussed on whether physiological traits can evolve quickly enough under rapidly increasing temperatures. While the simple Breeder's equation helps to understand how extreme temperatures and genetic variation might drive within-population evolution under climate change, it does not consider two key areas: how different forms of phenotypic plasticity interact and variation among populations. Plasticity can modify the exposure to climatic extremes and the strength of selection from those extremes, while differen..