ABSTRACT
The mechanisms with which organisms respond to their environment represent combinations of various facets of their internal workings, mainly biochemical, anatomical, physiological and behavioral. Despite the integrated actions of all these contributing processes, they are traditionally assigned to different sub-disciplines in biology. The sub-disciplines, in turn, tend to remain somewhat discrete from one another in practice, to the extent that the specific aspects of the mechanisms investigated by each are often not dealt with as truly integrated systems. Fertilization mechanisms provide a good example. The intersexual signaling of reproductively mature adults is usually dealt with independently of the coordinated maturation of the gonads or the structural compatibility of the sex organs, and so on, despite each playing a significant role in ultimately achieving fertilization and syngamy. We thus lose important aspects of the organisms’ synchronization with and adaptation to particular aspects of the environment.
