... selection in the past. The chapter considers two basic approaches to the problem of varying environments: phenotypic plasticity and bet-hedging. It also discusses bet-hedging in food production, the bet-hedging benefits of organic farming and animal agriculture, and the use of diversity for bet-hedging...

... the challenges presented by human domestication of nature. For example, ecologists are now deploying transplant experiments that test for local adaptation and plasticity in thermal tolerance among species populations and whether this adaptive capacity is sufficient to sustain biodiversity, food web dependencies...

...This chapter details the nature of plasticity and how it can be studied, focusing in particular on the “reaction norm” approach. The subsequent key questions first evaluate whether or not plasticity is typically adaptive, with the main alternative being maladaptive physiological responses to stress...

...This chapter examines the neuromolecular and plastic brain. Ideas about plasticity and the openness of brains to environment influences, from initial evidence about nerve development, through the recognition that synaptic plasticity was the very basis of learning and memory, to evidence about...

...This chapter examines phenotypic plasticity or genetic changes resulting from controlled selection regimes or the control of environmental variables, and testing for correlations of traits, which can provide insights into the evolutionary patterns and mechanisms of the domestication process...

... conditions on the evolution of dispersal among populations, and the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. dispersal species community module interaction network metacommunity equilibrium fitness population habitat selection evolutionarily stable strategy ideal free distribution chaos limit cycle...

... divergence, ecological speciation, and gene flow to population and community dynamics, ecosystem function, plasticity, and genomics. The book evaluates conceptual and methodological approaches, and draws on empirical data from natural populations—including those in human-disturbed environments—to tackle...