*Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy and the McCaig Bone and Joint Insitute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 4N1, Canada; Department of Anthropology and Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA, 02138, USA.
Integr Comp Biol. 2008 Sep;48(3):373-84. doi: 10.1093/icb/icn076. Epub 2008 Jul 25.
Understanding development is relevant to understanding evolution because developmental processes structure the expression of phenotypic variation upon which natural selection acts. Advances in developmental biology are fueling a new synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology, but it remains unclear how to use developmental information that largely derives from a few model organisms to test hypotheses about the evolutionary developmental biology of taxa such as humans and other primates that have not been or are not amenable to direct study through experimental developmental biology. In this article, we discuss how and when model organisms like mice are useful for studying the evolutionary developmental biology of even rather distantly related and morphologically different groups like primates. A productive approach is to focus on processes that are likely to play key roles in producing evolutionarily significant phenotypic variation across a large phylogenetic range. We illustrate this approach by applying the analysis of craniofacial variation in mouse mutant models to primate and human evolution.
理解发育对于理解进化很重要，因为发育过程构建了表型变异的表达，而自然选择正是在这些变异的基础上起作用。发育生物学的进步正在推动发育生物学和进化生物学的新综合，但目前尚不清楚如何利用主要来自少数几种模式生物的发育信息来检验关于人类和其他灵长类动物等尚未或不适于通过实验发育生物学进行直接研究的分类单元的进化发育生物学的假设。在本文中，我们讨论了像老鼠这样的模式生物如何以及何时可以用于研究即使是亲缘关系较远且形态差异较大的群体（如灵长类动物）的进化发育生物学。一种富有成效的方法是专注于那些在产生跨越大系统发育范围的具有进化意义的表型变异方面可能发挥关键作用的过程。我们通过将分析小鼠突变模型中的颅面变异应用于灵长类动物和人类进化来阐明这种方法。
