Natural selection, plasticity, and the rationale for largest-scale trends

摘要: Abstract Many have argued that there is no reason why natural selection should cause directional increases in measures such as body size or complexity across evolutionary history a whole. In this paper I argue conclusion does not hold for adaptations to environmental variability, and that, given the inevitability of trends variability are an expected feature evolution by selection. As concrete instance causal structure, outline how may be applied trend phenotypic plasticity.