Last week we established that climate change will affect every living thing on earth, but how is climate change connected to evolutionary biology?
Earth’s weather and temperature is a result of many complex and interrelated systems acting together, such as the ocean current, trade winds, and the distribution of the sun’s rays across our planet. As it is such a complicated occurrence, it’s reasonable to expect varied effects across different regions.  Â
Regional effects of climate change include the recent European heatwaves (Patz et al., 2005), increases in the range of many vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever and malaria (Rogers and Randolph, 2000), and up to 200 million people will be at increased risk for floods and storm surges (Patz et al., 2005).
Evolutionary biology is one of the widest fields of biology. It integrates many other sciences such as geology and genetics through to physics (Rymer, 2018). Evolutionary biology sheds light on how everything living came to be here, and how and where it is going in the future. It is an incredibly important field of science, and only more so in the light of climatic change.
The two are incredibly connected. Organisms adapt and optimise themselves to survive best in their current environment through natural selection, but this can be really thrown off by the kind of rapidly shifting environment caused by climate change. Â
This is a very important field of study. As the climate changes so do the pressures on organisms, causing altered states of evolution over just a few generations. An example would be ‘if plants evolve larger root systems in response to prolonged drought, they may deposit more carbon into the soil, thus increasing rates of carbon sequestration.’ (Monroe et al., 2018). This could lead to acceleration or mediation of climate change and is well worth researching.
Next week: A focus on insects
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220170351.htm
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/11/will-human-evolution-be-shaped-by-climate-change/
http://ecologyandevolution.cornell.edu/environmental-change-biodiversity
