Life adapts when necessitated by changing conditions that impact survival. These are evolutionary pressures, with nutrition being probably the strongest. Flora bend toward the sun and plunge rooty tendrils deep into soil in search of moisture and minerals, while mobile organisms walk, run, fly, crawl, scrounge, or swim for food. Herbivores prefer to go where the vegetation is the densest and most nutritious, while predators follow close behind. Life is in constant flux, then, with food availability as the invisible hand directing traffic.
Flux is great, exciting stuff, but it makes for difficult research into cause and effect. It heralds the introduction of myriad variables. So we often go to the lab for sterile, randomized controlled trials in an attempt to limit these variables and in a desire for scientific certainty. But real life is messy, complex and difficult to model. This is why isolated populations in actual, natural […]
Original post by Mark Sisson
Filed under: Fitness