The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems

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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.

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The Evolutionary Strategies that Shape Ecosystems Review

Don't be fooled by the triangle on the front cover; the book isn't a simple repeat of Grime's well-worn triangle theory, although it does add to it plenty with a whole chapter on life-history traits in animals and microbes. It's more about how evolution and ecology are related to one another, and how the evolution of species is affected by their ecology, and how this feeds back on itself. The book mainly deals with community assembly rules and the effects of species' traits on the timing and extent of things happening in the ecosystem. Recently Hubbell's unified neutral model of biodiversity has gotten a lot of attention, but Grime reaffirms that biodiversity has an evolutionary basis, and more importantly gets into the nuts and bolts of adaptation and how this relates to ecology. He even describes the neutral theory as "self-falsifying".

The reference list alone looks to be about a thousand references long, and the whole book can be seen as an in-depth and up to date review of eco-evolutionary dynamics. The species index ranges from everything from to Acrocanthosaurus to Zygiella spiders. I'd never realized how fossil evidence can reveal the ecological similarities between specific dinosaurs and modern animals, and how extinct animals relate to wider ecological theory. It pretty much blew me away how all the bits of the puzzle fit, and the panorama Grime paints with "a conceptual framework in which evolutionary and ecological processes can be reconciled and are viewed as part of a single natural creative phenomenon that extends above and below the level of species.". Awesome!

I was a little shocked by the price at first, but I had to get this book, and I'm glad I did (although perhaps I would have given half a star less because of the price, but there wasn't the choice).

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