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Abstract Predicting if, when, and how populations can adapt to climate change constitutes one of the greatest challenges in science today. Here, we build from contributions to the special issue on evolutionary adaptation to climate change, a survey of its authors, and recent literature to explore the limits and opportunities for predicting adaptive responses to climate change. We outline what might be predictable now, in the future, and perhaps never even with our best efforts. More accurate predictions are expected for traits characterized by a well-understood mapping between genotypes and phenotypes and traits experiencing strong, direct selection due to climate change. A meta-analysis revealed an overall moderate trait heritability and evolvability in studies performed under future climate conditions but indicated no significant change between current and future climate conditions, suggesting neither more nor less genetic variation for adapting to future climates. Predicting population persistence and evolutionary rescue remains uncertain, especially for the many species without sufficient ecological data. Still, when polled, authors contributing to this special issue were relatively optimistic about our ability to predict future evolutionary responses to climate change. Predictions will improve as we expand efforts to understand diverse organisms, their ecology, and their adaptive potential. Advancements in functional genomic resources, especially their extension to non-model species and the union of evolutionary experiments and “omics,” should also enhance predictions. Although predicting evolutionary responses to climate change remains challenging, even small advances will reduce the substantial uncertainties surrounding future evolutionary responses to climate change. 

Abstract Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms underlying the maintenance of individual differences in behavior and physiology is a fundamental goal in ecology and evolution. The pace‐of‐life syndrome hypothesis is often invoked to explain the maintenance of such within‐population variation. This hypothesis predicts that behavioral traits are part of a suite of correlated traits that collectively determine an individual's propensity to prioritize reproduction or survival. A key assumption of this hypothesis is that these traits are underpinned by genetic trade‐offs among life‐history traits: genetic variants that increase fertility, reproduction and growth might also reduce lifespan. We performed a systematic literature review and meta‐analysis to summarize the evidence for the existence of genetic trade‐offs between five key life‐history traits: survival, growth rate, body size, maturation rate, and fertility. Counter to our predictions, we found an overall positive genetic correlation between survival and other life‐history traits and no evidence for any genetic correlations between the non‐survival life‐history traits. This finding was generally consistent across pairs of life‐history traits, sexes, life stages, lab vs. field studies, and narrow‐ vs. broad‐sense correlation estimates. Our study highlights that genetic trade‐offs may not be as common, or at least not as easily quantifiable, in animals as often assumed.