Department of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79409, USA.
J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol. 2012 Sep;318(6):480-8. doi: 10.1002/jez.b.21435. Epub 2011 Sep 6.
Development plays a critical role in structuring the joint offspring-parent phenotype distribution. It thus must be part of any truly general evolutionary theory. Historically, the offspring-parent distribution has often been treated in such a way as to bury the contribution of development, by distilling from it a single term, either heritability or additive genetic variance, and then working only with this term. I discuss two reasons why this approach is no longer satisfactory. First, the regression of expected offspring phenotype on parent phenotype can easily be nonlinear, and this nonlinearity can have a pronounced impact on the response to selection. Second, even when the offspring-parent regression is linear, it is nearly always a function of the environment, and the precise way that heritability covaries with the environment can have a substantial effect on adaptive evolution. Understanding these complexities of the offspring-parent distribution will require understanding of the developmental processes underlying the traits of interest. I briefly discuss how we can incorporate such complexity into formal evolutionary theory, and why it is likely to be important even for traits that are not traditionally the focus of evo-devo research. Finally, I briefly discuss a topic that is widely seen as being squarely in the domain of evo-devo: novelty. I argue that the same conceptual and mathematical framework that allows us to incorporate developmental complexity into simple models of trait evolution also yields insight into the evolution of novel traits.
发育在构建亲子后代表型分布中起着至关重要的作用。因此，它必须成为任何真正通用进化理论的一部分。从历史上看，亲子代分布经常被这样处理，通过从其中提取出一个单一的术语，即遗传力或加性遗传方差，并仅使用这个术语，从而掩盖了发育的贡献。我讨论了这种方法不再令人满意的两个原因。首先，预期后代表型对亲本表型的回归很容易是非线性的，这种非线性会对选择反应产生显著影响。其次，即使亲子回归是线性的，它也几乎总是环境的函数，遗传力与环境的精确关系会对适应性进化产生实质性影响。理解亲子分布的这些复杂性将需要理解感兴趣性状背后的发育过程。我简要讨论了如何将这种复杂性纳入正式的进化理论，以及为什么即使对于传统上不是进化发育研究焦点的性状，它也可能很重要。最后，我简要讨论了一个被广泛认为是进化发育领域的话题：新颖性。我认为，允许我们将发育复杂性纳入简单性状进化模型的相同概念和数学框架，也为新颖性状的进化提供了一些见解。
