Smith Kathleen K
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
Int J Dev Biol. 2003;47(7-8):613-21.
The concept of heterochrony, which denotes a change in the relative timing of developmental events and processes in evolution, has accompanied attempts to link evolution and development for well over a century. During this time the definition of heterochrony and the application of the concept have varied and by the late 1990's, many questioned the usefulness of the concept. However, in the past decade studies of heterochrony have been revitalized by a new focus on developmental sequence, an examination of heterochrony in explicit phylogenetic contexts and increasing tendencies to examine the heterochrony of many kinds of events, including cellular, molecular and genetic events. Examples of such studies are reviewed in this paper and it is argued that this new application of heterochrony provides an extraordinarily rich opportunity for understanding the developmental basis of evolutionary change.
异时性的概念，即指进化过程中发育事件和进程的相对时间发生变化，在将进化与发育联系起来的尝试中已经存在了一个多世纪。在此期间，异时性的定义和该概念的应用各不相同，到20世纪90年代末，许多人质疑该概念的实用性。然而，在过去十年中，对异时性的研究因对发育序列的新关注、在明确的系统发育背景下对异时性的研究以及对包括细胞、分子和遗传事件在内的多种事件的异时性进行研究的趋势增加而得以复兴。本文对这类研究的实例进行了综述，并认为异时性的这种新应用为理解进化变化的发育基础提供了极其丰富的机会。
