LAST TREE STANDING ...CAN EVOLUTION ENDURE?

摘要

Just like human society, natural environments are constantly changing. In winter, temperatures and precipitation are very different from what they are like in summer. A patch of land that is dry one day may be flooded by an overflowing river the next. Even within a single day, conditions can change quite dramatically. Think, for example, of a plant in the desert: at night there is no light available for it to perform photosynthesis, while at the same time temperatures drop below freezing point. Just hours later, however, the same desert will be burning hot, and the plant is all but scorched by the sun. In each of the above cases, there are likely to be at least some organisms that are able to survive the changes in their environment. In fact, some may even need them; they have come to anticipate them. This remarkable achievement is the result of thousands, or even millions, of years of adaptation by natural selection, where only the organisms that were best adapted to their changing environments survived to pass on their genes to the next generation.