Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from the broadest macroscale systematics to microevolutionary process. The shocks point to changes over time which have a general effect, but what about exogenous parameters which shift spatially and regularly? I’m talking latitudes here. The further you get from the equator the more the climate varies over the season, and the lower the mean temperature, and, the less the aggregate radiation the biosphere catches. Allen’s rule and Bergmann’s rule are two observational trends which biologists have long observed in relation to many organisms. The equatorial variants are slimmer in their physique, while the polar ones are stockier. Additionally, there tends to be an increase in mean mass as one moves away from the equator.
But these rules are just general observations. What process underlies these observations? The likely culprit would be natural selection of course. But the specific manner in which this process shakes out, on both the organismic and genetic level, still needs to be elucidated …