Historically, the common view of phenotypic plasticity was that it represented noise in the relationship between genotypic and phenotypic variation, and thus inhibited the response to selection and adaptive evolution. More recently, there has been a renaissance of interest in plasticity and how it may aid adaptive evolution. My graduate student Drew Russey takes an experimental approach to this problem, selecting for thermally-dependent increases in locomotor performance in experimental Drosophila melanogaster populations that either are, or are not, induced to express thermally-dependent flight morphologies. Thusfar, he has found that the expression of plasticity facilitates greatly adaptation to novel flight environments over a few and even many generations. Although his work is ongoing, it seems to suggest strongly that phenotypic plasticity can significantly increase the rate and degree of adaptation to new environments.