Organism and Environment

Sonia E. Sultan is Professor of Biology and Professor of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, where her research group studies plant ecological development. She has long been a major contributor to the empirical and conceptual literatures on individual plasticity and its relation to ecological breadth and adaptive evolution. Sultan studied History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton University, followed by graduate work in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of California (Davis) Center for Population Biology, and a Fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

1. The Environmental Context of Development ; 2. The Organism-Environment Relationship: Ecological niches, adaptation, eco-devo and niche construction ; 3. Mechanisms of Plasticity: Eco-Devo pathways as environmental cue and response systems ; 4. Ecological Development as Niche Construction: How plasticity shapes the environment an organism experiences ; 5. Habitat Construction and Functional Feedbacks: How organisms modify their external conditions ; 6. Community-level Consequences of Habitat Construction and Eco-devo Responses ; 7. Natural Selection in the Light of the Organism-Environment Relationship ; 8. Epilogue: Research directions and real-world challenges