The Flexible Organism

摘要

In the last chapter of How and Why Species Multiply (1), Peter and Rosemary Grant concluded that "[n]othing in evo-rnlutionary biology makes sense except in the light of ecology." In Ecological Developmental Biology, Scott Gilbert and David Epel argue that nothing in developmental biology makes sense except in the light of ecology either.rnTraditionally, ecology-the study of the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings-rnhas not featured prominently in developmental biology. Yet, as Gilbert and Epel (developmental biologists at Swarthmore College and Stanford University, respectively) observe, biologists have known for at least a century that ecology is an essential partner in development: In 1909, Danish biologist Wilhelm Johannsen asserted that an organism's appearance, physiology, and behavior (that is, its phenotype) derive from an interaction between its genes and its environment.