The main question in the article is here (remember in real science each answer leads to new questions):

Plasticity can help animals and plants thrive as conditions change. Insects, for example, emerge from cocoons in the spring as they sense the days getting longer. Their clock is genetically encoded, but they are also plastic enough to emerge ahead of schedule if the plants they feed on start growing sooner.

On the other hand, genes themselves can change, too. When the environment changes, individuals with certain genetic variations may be more likely to survive than others and have more offspring. They pass down their own genes to the next generation, and over time the entire population changes thanks to natural selection.

Yet conservation biologists have only rarely looked into which cause — plasticity or natural selection — has been responsible for the climate-driven changes they’ve documented. “People really weren’t thinking about evolution at all,” says David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “They thought it happened on thousand-year time scales.”