There is No Such Thing as Bad Weather—Just the Wrong Clothes

We Brits have a global reputation for being obsessed with the weather. Conversation around the dinner table never runs dry. As soon as awkward pauses creep into our social interactions, we can always revert to discussing our favourite topic. “Yes, Jim, you’re right it was a bit nippy today. I believe it’s as a result of strong Siberian winds being swept in from the continent.” The table is revived and the dinner party saved as everyone suddenly metamorphosises into a professional meteorologist offering up their opinion as fact. So is our obsession with the weather simply an artefact of our “stiff upper-lip” and our inability to hold a conversation? Or, can we find a more biological explanation for it?

Perhaps there is a reason why the weather appears to weigh so much more heavily on the minds of Brits than it does on individuals of other nationalities. The answer may lie in an evolutionary phenomenon known as “phenotypic plasticity”. It is generally accepted that there are three ways in which organisms are able to cope with environmental and climatic changes. Firstly, they can migrate to a new area that is more suited to their needs. Secondly, they can rely on natural selection to allow them to adapt in situ. Finally, they can rely on the phenotypic plasticity of their genomes.

A phenotype is essentially a trait or adaptation that is the physical manifestation of a genotype (a collection of genes) – a genotype coding for eye colour may result in the phenotype of having blue eyes. “Phenotypic plasticity” is therefore defined as the ability of a single genotype to produce a range of phenotypes in different environments. If an individual has blue eyes in cold weather but brown eyes in warm weather, this would be an example of the same genotype creating two different phenotypes in relation to the environment, and “eye colour” would therefore be considered a phenotypically plastic trait. If, however, the individual had blue eyes in both environments then “eye colour” would not be phenotypically plastic. The strategy that is adopted in relation to environmental and climatic change is entirely dependent on the lifestyle of the organism in question.

Organisms that are long-lived with long generation times and an inability to migrate tend to be the most reliant on phenotypic plasticity as a means of coping with change. This is because the longer an individual lives the more likely they are to encounter a range of environmental and climatic changes throughout their lifetime. Long-lived organisms also tend to have long generation times which means that adaptation insitu is not an option – mutations cannot accumulate fast enough for natural selection to be able to act upon them. Humans are a very good example of an organism that fulfils all of the above criteria: we experience many different environmental and climatic conditions within our lifetimes, we take over a decade to reach sexual maturity and, historically, we are reluctant to move away from our places of birth.

One need only look at the erratic weather of the last 12 months to appreciate the adaptive significance of being able to respond to change plastically. Firstly, let’s imagine that “getting dressed” is our phenotype and that it has a high degree of plasticity associated with it – this means that the same genotype for “getting dressed” will allow me to wear shorts and a t-shirt in summer whilst also causing me to don my duffle coat in winter. Now let’s imagine that the phenotype is not plastic and that “getting dressed” actually means “put on my shorts and t-shirt regardless of the weather” – this is fine for the summer months but will lead me to catch hypothermia in the winter months. Humans are long-lived and therefore experience a large number of environmental changes both within a lifetime and within a single year – being able to respond to these changes is therefore key for survival.

Discussion of the weather could be acting as a stimulus that induces change in the phenotypically plastic trait of “getting dressed”, ensuring that we do not overheat or supercool. If “getting dressed” was not a plastic trait then we would gain very little from our painstaking conversations about temperature and rainfall. Talking about the weather might allow us to pre-empt climatic changes and therefore adjust our behaviour accordingly. If we were hear that there is a massive snow storm expected to hit in the morning, our genotype for “getting dressed” might respond to this information by causing us to put on appropriate clothing the next day even if the current prevailing conditions are pleasant and warm. This plasticity would make us much more likely to survive sudden environmental and climatic perturbations as we are prepared for them. The weather in Britain is peculiarly unreliable which could help to explain why we appear to be so much more concerned with it than most other nationalities: the need to respond rapidly to change is greatest in environments that are especially unpredictable.  As my mother always tells me, “there is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes.”

The concept of phenotypic plasticity is becoming increasingly integrated into mainstream theories of conservation as it can help us to predict how organisms might respond to anthropogenically induced climate change. We are now able to assess levels of phenotypic plasticity, and this is beginning to influence the approaches undertaken for the conservation of a species. If our aim is to conserve biodiversity, we need to be targeting organisms that are reliant on migration and adaptation as their means of coping with a changing environment. Phenotypically plastic organisms are resilient across a wide range of climatic conditions. Therefore, they are less vulnerable to extinction as a result of rapid anthropogenically induced climate change. By focusing our efforts on the least phenotypically plastic species, we ensure that we save those that are the most vulnerable to extinction and therefore achieve the largest amount of biodiversity.