BIOL370 Lecture Notes - Cytosol, Biomedicine, Osmolyte
8 Dec 2013
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Document Summary
Unity in diversity: a perspective on the methods, contributions, and future of comparative. Comparative physiologists are fundamentally curious about how animals work , and study how natural variation allows organisms to function in the diverse habitat conditions they face. Success of comparative approach is marked by the emergence of a unity of principle from the study of diverse solutions to a common problem. History of comparative physiology reveals that natural variation has played two important and distinct roles in the development of the discipline. Intellectual core of the field: focus of an exploratory spirit in comparative physiologists. Origin and adaptation are central themes throughout comparative physiology. Study of adaptive variation among species provides insights into basic physiological principles and also yields rewards for investigations at higher levels of biological organization. As genetic underpinnings of physiological variation are discovered, ambiguities about the adaptive significance of traits and the origins of these traits during evolution will be reduced.
