Hilary S. Callahan

TL;DR: It is advocated for the view that relaxed selection and variable selection intensities are likely more important constraints to the evolution of plasticity than the costs of Plasticity, and opportunities to offset costs of phenotypes through ontogeny, amelioration of phenotypic costs across environments, and the condition-dependent hypothesis are examined.

TL;DR: Current methods for calculating selection coefficients using path analysis are expanded and nonlinear selection is demonstrated with an analysis of selection in an experimental population of Arabidopsis thaliana consisting of 289 individuals.

TL;DR: Despite the contrast in habitats, there was limited differentiation between populations for survivorship, reproductive fitness, size-related or flowering time traits, and no differ- entiation for trait plasticities.

TL;DR: Messages emerging from microbial work can guide future efforts to understand the evolution of plastic traits in diverse organisms, and empirical estimation of key parameters is tractable.

TL;DR: It is suggested that angiosperm taxa, which diversified since the early Cretaceous, evolved thinner roots with greater root length per unit of biomass invested (i.e., specific root length [SRL]) than earlier diverging taxa.