Dobzhansky famously said that “nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution” — I would suggest that evolution hardly makes sense except in the light of ecology, which defines the selective landscape against which evolution and natural selection play out.

1. • Individuals in populations are not identical, some variation is heritable — common garden and reciprocal transplant experiments are classic approaches to identifying which variation IS heritable
   • Phenotypic plasticity is the ability to display different phenotypes in different environments
   • Different ancestors leave different numbers of descendants — in part because they are better suited to the local environment
   • Adaptation to local conditions and resources can drive speciation because hybrids may be less suited to specific environments — success can only be explained in light of environmental context.
   • Similar ecology drives similar selection — convergent and parallel evolution illustrate how similar ecological conditions result in similar, and predictable, evolutionary paths (relevant for applied ecology in harvest and resistance management)
   • All these processes that change the relative frequencies of genotypes within a population (differential survival and reproduction) can change the relative frequencies of species in communities as well — and given the inter-dependence of species, can have cascading effects on communities.