Symposium: "Selection and Evolution of Organismal Performance in Nature", to be held January 2003 in Toronto, Canada.

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AbstractHow the ability of organisms to perform key tasks-to run, fly, forage, acquire and process nutrients, regulate water and ions-evolves in response to selection in natural environments is a central issue for understanding adaptation and organismal diversity. During the past two decades researchers have developed a theoretical and methodological framework for addressing this issue, and have applied this framework to a diverse set of natural systems. We have organized a society-wide symposium, entitled Selection and evolution of organismal performance in nature, for the January 2003 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, in Toronto, Ontario. The symposium brings together leading junior and senior researchers whose studies integrate analyses of organismal performance, phenotypic selection, and microevolution in nature. Collectively, these studies consider a diversity of taxa, habitats, components of performance, and empirical and theoretical approaches that address the question: What are the mechanisms and patterns of selection and microevolution of organismal performance in natural populations? The symposium will identify commonalities and differences in patterns of selection and evolution among different systems and performance traits; provide a forum for discussing methodological and conceptual challenges of studying performance in nature; and suggest new directions for the field. The proceedings of the symposium will be published in Integrative and Comparative Biology, the leading journal in the field of Integrative Biology.