Interesting discussion, particularly on the tension between development, environment, and genes. I suppose the best way to build an organism would be to use genes to permit a certain amount of "fine tuning" based on the environment during development, assuming a single "best" solution isn't available, and it seems like often it wouldn't be (there are typically tradeoffs). A species that has experienced many and varied environments in the past would presumably have better fine tuning mechanisms than one which experienced a more stable environment in it's evolutionary past. As always, the more you think about evolution the more mind blowing it seems.
This is a classic topic in genetics and evolution and a particular form is something called a 'reaction norm', which is a function that describes the relationship, for some trait, between a fixed genotype and variable phenotype across an environmental gradient. Genotypes influence how environments affect outcome, they don't typically determine an invariant outcome.
Interesting discussion, particularly on the tension between development, environment, and genes. I suppose the best way to build an organism would be to use genes to permit a certain amount of "fine tuning" based on the environment during development, assuming a single "best" solution isn't available, and it seems like often it wouldn't be (there are typically tradeoffs). A species that has experienced many and varied environments in the past would presumably have better fine tuning mechanisms than one which experienced a more stable environment in it's evolutionary past. As always, the more you think about evolution the more mind blowing it seems.
This is a classic topic in genetics and evolution and a particular form is something called a 'reaction norm', which is a function that describes the relationship, for some trait, between a fixed genotype and variable phenotype across an environmental gradient. Genotypes influence how environments affect outcome, they don't typically determine an invariant outcome.
Flowbee