Costs and Consequences of Evolutionary Temperature Adaptation: Response pt. 1

In the reading by Andrew Clarke, the author gives his own personal opinions on the effect that evolutionary temperature adaptation has on life history theory, food-web dynamics, biological diversity, and biotic response to climate change. His two main goals of the paper are to identify important gaps in our general knowledge of evolutionary temperature adaptation and secondly to explore the consequences of the adaptation of temperature for ecology. Clarke points to a simple model of evolutionary temperature compensation in cellular models to propose two questions. One being how has evolution altered physiology at different temperatures and the other being to what extent has full compensation been achieved? He claims that organisms maintain physiological rates by three different strategies: quantitative, qualitative, and modulation. He then points to the relationship between enzyme function and organism performance as a way of looking into the compensation required. The changes in temperature can potentially cause for metabolic imbalances. However, he points out that in order to have a full understanding of this effect we need to understand the dynamic behavior of the metabolic system in order to know cellular responses to thermal change.