Smith Kathleen K
Departments of Biology and Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
J Morphol. 2002 Apr;252(1):82-97. doi: 10.1002/jmor.10014.
One of the most persistent questions in comparative developmental biology concerns whether there are general rules by which ontogeny and phylogeny are related. Answering this question requires conceptual and analytic approaches that allow biologists to examine a wide range of developmental events in well-structured phylogenetic contexts. For evolutionary biologists, one of the most dominant approaches to comparative developmental biology has centered around the concept of heterochrony. However, in recent years the focus of studies of heterochrony largely has been limited to one aspect, changes in size and shape. I argue that this focus has restricted the kinds of questions that have been asked about the patterns of developmental change in phylogeny, which has narrowed our ability to address some of the most fundamental questions about development and evolution. Here I contrast the approaches of growth heterochrony with a broader view of heterochrony that concentrates on changes in developmental sequence. I discuss a general approach to sequence heterochrony and summarize newly emerging methods to analyze a variety of kinds of developmental change in explicit phylogenetic contexts. Finally, I summarize a series of studies on the evolution of development in mammals that use these new approaches.
比较发育生物学中最持久的问题之一是，个体发育与系统发育之间是否存在普遍规律。要回答这个问题，需要概念性和分析性的方法，使生物学家能够在结构良好的系统发育背景下研究广泛的发育事件。对于进化生物学家来说，比较发育生物学最主要的方法之一一直围绕着异时性的概念。然而，近年来，异时性研究的重点很大程度上局限于一个方面，即大小和形状的变化。我认为这种重点限制了关于系统发育中发育变化模式所提出问题的种类，从而缩小了我们解决一些关于发育和进化的最基本问题的能力。在这里，我将生长异时性的方法与更广泛的异时性观点进行对比，后者关注发育序列的变化。我讨论了序列异时性的一般方法，并总结了在明确的系统发育背景下分析各种发育变化的新出现的方法。最后，我总结了一系列使用这些新方法对哺乳动物发育进化的研究。
