Environmental stress, adaptation and evolution: an overview

Environmental stress can be characterized as a force shaping adaptation and evolution in changing environments, and it is a property of both the stressor and the stressed. Here we aim to give an overview of the state of the art of evolutionarily orientated stress research and the progress it has made during the last decade. We do this by introducing the contributions to this issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology that resulted from a workshop held in August 2004 in Sandbjerg (Denmark), sponsored by the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). … The statement above by Darwin can already be found on the second page of the introductory chapter of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and expresses his view that, even though adaptation of individuals to their natural physical and biotic environment is central in his theory of evolution, he thought that this was mainly governed through intra and interspecific competition. To Darwin, competition between ‘organic beings’ was far more significant than adaptation to environmental conditions. This preponderance of competition in his theory is expressed even more clearly in Chapter III of the book. Based on the observation that many organisms produce far more offspring than necessary to sustain their numbers, he describes his basic idea concerning the ‘struggle for existence’ that forms the foundation of his theory of evolution and states that numbers are not so much limited by lack of adaptation to particular climates but much more by the competition with other ‘organic beings’: