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Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.
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Earth's Climate History Explains Life's Temperature Optima.

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Keywords:
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Area of Science:

  • Evolutionary biology
  • Microbial ecology
  • Geological oceanography

Background:

  • Most life forms thrive within a narrow optimal temperature range, typically below 40°C.
  • Earth's oceanic temperatures have remained stable between approximately 5°C and 37°C for over two billion years.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the evolutionary constraints on life's thermal performance curves.
  • To test if interspecific competition can explain the upper limit of optimal growth temperatures in prokaryotes.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized Lotka-Volterra models to simulate interspecific competition.
  • Modeled competition between organisms with varying temperature optima.

Main Results:

  • Model simulations supported the hypothesis that organisms with temperature optima up to 37°C are most competitive.
  • Results remained robust across various temperature response curve scenarios.

Conclusions:

  • Ancient oceanic temperature stability likely constrained prokaryotic evolution to optimal growth temperatures below 40°C.
  • Gene inheritance and co-evolution may have led to eukaryotes also adopting similar thermal optima.