Adaptation, extinction and global change (original) (raw)

Global change presents a clear, immediate and urgent challenge for evolutionary biology. The transformation of environments by agriculture and industry has created, and continues to create, a wide range of unintentional experiments in which populations are exposed to severe and novel perturbations, and either adapt to them or cease to exist. The greatest of these experiments is now under way: the alteration of the atmosphere and climate of the Earth, with consequences for every living thing. In this opening article of a new journal, we shall not attempt to offer a review of the whole field, which would be too intricate and extensive to fit within the confines of a short paper. We shall instead try to sketch the main tasks that we think that evolutionary biologists should undertake to contribute to our understanding of the future. Our account is organized into three sections. The first deals with the variability that is commonly experienced by natural populations, and how they respond to it. The second is concerned with whether or not populations can adapt to a novel and severe stress before being extinguished by it. The final section describes how phytoplankton populations may adapt to the prime mover of change, the increase in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The emphasis throughout is quantitative and experimental. We hope, and we believe, that evolutionary biology is the key to predicting how the world will change, and we see this as the principal task of evolutionary biologists in the next few decades.