Plants and animals have adapted to their environments genetically and by means of physiological, behavioral, or developmental flexibility, including both instinctive behavior and learning. Adaptation has many dimensions in that most organisms must conform simultaneously to numerous different aspects of their environments. Adaptation involves coping not only with the physical abiotic environment (light, dark, temperature, water, wind), but also with the complex biotic environment (other organisms such as mates, competitors, parasites , predators, and escape tactics of prey).
Every individual is simultaneously a member of a population, a species, and a community; therefore, it must be adapted to cope with each and must be considered in that context. An individual's fitness — its ability to perpetuate itself as measured by its reproductive success — is greatly influenced by its status within its own population. An individual might be a resident or a vagrant, mated or unmated, or high or low in a pecking order, all factors that strongly affect its fitness.
Ultimately, natural selection operates only by differential reproductive success. An individual's ability to perpetuate itself as measured by its reproductive success is known as its Darwinian fitness.
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Plants and animals have adapted to their environments genetically and by means of physiological, behavioral, or developmental flexibility, including both instinctive behavior and learning. Adaptation has many dimensions in that most organisms must conform simultaneously to numerous different aspects of their environments. Adaptation involves coping not only with the physical abiotic environment (light, dark, temperature, water, wind), but also with the complex biotic environment (other organisms such as mates, competitors, parasites , predators, and escape tactics of prey). Conflicting demands of these various environmental components often require that an organism compromise in its adaptations to each.
ReplyDeleteEvery individual is simultaneously a member of a population, a species, and a community; therefore, it must be adapted to cope with each and must be considered in that context. An individual’s fitness—its ability to perpetuate itself as measured by its reproductive success—is greatly influenced by its status within its own population. An individual might be a resident or a vagrant, mated or unmated, or high or low in a pecking order, all factors that strongly affect its fitness. Any given individual’s fitness is also influenced by various interspecific associations of its species and especially by the particular community in which it finds itself embedded.
Whenever one organism leaves more successful offspring than others, in time its genes will come to dominate the population gene pool. Ultimately, natural selection operates only by differential reproductive success. An individual’s ability to perpetuate itself as measured by its reproductive success is known as its Darwinian fitness.