Meeting Abstract
Biological materials, whether inside or outside an organism, play a vital role in survival and mediation of interactions with the environment. Although the characterization of biomaterials performance has leapt forward in the past decades, our understanding of how performance varies and is shaped across ecology or evolutionary history lags behind. Is performance at a material level selected for in evolution? How do abiotic factors limit and enhance function? How do materials respond, adapt, and evolve with environment and organism? This talk will provide an introduction to these questions, which will then be addressed further throughout the day by the speakers in symposium S4, “Adaptation and Evolution of Biological Materials.” The session will cover a range of organisms and organizational scales, from skeletal form-function evolution to material-mediated vibration sensing, structural color, and plant and animal anchoring tools. Our introduction highlights the intention behind that diversity, as we showcase the common opportunities that modern materials approaches provide for integrative studies of organismal adaptation and evolution.
