Beneficial acclimation hypothesis

The beneficial acclimation hypothesis (BAH) is the physiological hypothesis that acclimating to a particular environment (usually thermal) provides an organism with advantages in that environment. First formally tested by Armand Marie Leroi, Albert Bennett, and Richard Lenski in 1994, it has however been a central assumption in historical physiological work that acclimation is adaptive. Further refined by Raymond B. Huey and David Berrigan under the strong inference approach, the hypothesis has been falsified as a general rule by a series of multiple hypotheses experiments. Acclimation is a set of physiological responses that occurs during an individual's lifetime to chronic laboratory-induced environmental conditions (in contrast to acclimatization). It is one component of adaptation. While physiologists have traditionally assumed that acclimation is beneficial (or explicitly defined it as such), criticism of the adaptationist program by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin led to a call for increased robustness in testing adaptationist hypotheses.