It is evident that the authors have a put in a lot of effort into conducting this meta-analysis, and I do agree that thermal adaptation and the evolution of TPCs is an interesting and pressing topic given the rate of current climate change. However, one main concern I have, is that I am unsure why the authors focused only on artificial selection studies, but excluded those in natural populations. The authors mentioned that artificial studies ‘allow quantifying evolutionary changes readily’, but to me this argument is not strong enough – results from wild studies are also readily extractible and interpretable, and can nicely complement lab studies by providing observed realized thermal adaptation through evolution. Without tapping into natural studies, I am doubtful whether the results are still generalizable, which is a chief goal for a meta-analysis. In addition, I believe the current manuscript would benefit a lot from better structuring of the introduction and the methods section. The authors have done a superb job on elaborating the main concepts and relevance of this study. However, to me there still lacks a clear objective, and details on how shifts in TPCs were quantified. There also lacked details on sample sizes from the literature search, justification of the moderators included in the analyses, model selection processes, etc, which makes it difficult to assess the quality of the analysis and statistical power of the dataset, hence the validity of the findings. Detailed comments are below:
L7-8: How exactly did you characterise evolutionary response of TPCs in your study?
L9-10: Why artificial studies only? Why not wild studies as well given artificial environments cannot fully emulate natural climate changes and characteristics?
L12-14: More details are needed. What exactly did you look at in your analyses? The shape of TPCs? The logical steps of how you reached your conclusion that there was a ‘clear positive response to temperature selection’ was not immediately clear to me. Also, I feel it is an overstatement when your reaction norm dataset yielded mixed results.
L16-17: Please briefly elaborate on the ‘hotter is better’ and ‘hotter is wider’ hypotheses at the beginning of your abstract, considering this is one of the focuses of your study.
L53-57: Would be helpful to add an illustrative diagram of the evolutionary shift in TPC and differences between the ‘Hotter is better’ vs ‘Hotter is wider’ theories.
L76-79: This sentence feels unclear to me. How did you quantify trade-offs? Why would you expect the factors mentioned here to affect evolutionary response?
L81: How many species and effect sizes were included in your analysis? If your sample size was 47, have you done any power analysis to test that null results are not due to a lack of statistical power?
L89: Please at least include a PRISMA diagram of the systematic lit search process.
L102: Please state sample size, number of studies, number of taxa etc. I am confused by the numbers, you mentioned 755 fitness metrics included, but 231 TPCs. What does the dataset look like?
L104-107: Did you also look at the differences between fitness metrics used in these studies?
L163: What about the ‘hotter is wider’ hypothesis?
L164-168: How are the data distributed across these explanatory variables? How many studies did you exclude by adding in generation time?
L176-177: I wonder why you did not add a phylogenetic distance matrix as a random variable to account for phylogenetic non-independence separated from non-evolution-related convergence (see e.g. Hadfield & Nakagawa 2010 Journal of Evolutionary Biology)? Can you also include explained heterogeneity of your random variables e.g. I^2?
L180: Funnel plots could be unreliable in detecting publication bias (e.g. Terrin et al 2005, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology). Have you also performed statistical tests such as trim-and-fill analysis or Egger’s regression? I see now you have included this in your supplementary, but I would recommend you mention this in the main text. What did you fit as your explanatory variable in your publication bias model? Please report model results,
L218-219: I am unsure why you would fit a cubic relationship if you expect TPCs to be unimodal. Please justify. Also please include model selection procedures in your methods section.
L243-244: I wonder why not, including so would allow a lot more insights into actual thermal adaptation in the wild, which is ultimately the goal of understanding evolution in climate change, especially given the large number of studies across species. Comparison between natural vs experimental studies would also provide insights into study design in the future. L324: I am unsure whether this section is relevant to your study and findings.
Fig. S1. I would move this as a main figure. Please also include the number of papers you excluded based on each criterium.