In 1837 a young Charles Darwin took his notebook, wrote "I think"
and then sketched a rudimentary, stick-like tree. Each branch of
Darwin's tree of life told a story of survival and adaptation -
adaptation of animals and plants not just to the environment but
also to life with other living things. However, more than 150 years
since Darwin published his singular idea of natural selection, the
science of ecology has yet to account for how contrasting
evolutionary outcomes affect the ability of organisms to coexist in
communities and to regulate ecosystem functioning.
In this book Philip Grime and Simon Pierce explain how evidence
from across the world is revealing that, beneath the wealth of
apparently limitless and bewildering variation in detailed
structure and functioning, the essential biology of all organisms
is subject to the same set of basic interacting constraints on
life-history and physiology. The inescapable resulting predicament
during the evolution of every species is that, according to
habitat, each must adopt a predictable compromise with regard to
how they use the resources at their disposal in order to survive.
The compromise involves the investment of resources in either the
effort to acquire more resources, the tolerance of factors that
reduce metabolic performance, or reproduction. This three-way
trade-off is the irreducible core of the "universal adaptive
strategy theory" which Grime and Pierce use to investigate how two
environmental filters selecting, respectively, for convergence and
divergence in organism function determine the identity of organisms
in communities, and ultimately how different evolutionary
strategies affect the functioning of ecosystems. This book reflects
an historic phase in which evolutionary processes are finally
moving centre stage in the effort to unify ecological theory, and
animal, plant and microbial ecology have begun to find a common
theoretical framework.
Visit www.wiley.com/go/grime/evolutionarystrategies to access
the artwork from the book.
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