Why call it developmental bias when it is just development?
Salazar Ciudad, Isaac (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Genètica i de Microbiologia)

Fecha:	2021
Resumen:	The concept of developmental constraints has been central to understand the role of development in morphological evolution. Developmental constraints are classically defined as biases imposed by development on the distribution of morphological variation. This opinion article argues that the concepts of developmental constraints and developmental biases do not accurately represent the role of development in evolution. The concept of developmental constraints was coined to oppose the view that natural selection is all-capable and to highlight the importance of development for understanding evolution. In the modern synthesis, natural selection was seen as the main factor determining the direction of morphological evolution. For that to be the case, morphological variation needs to be isotropic (i. e. equally possible in all directions). The proponents of the developmental constraint concept argued that development makes that some morphological variation is more likely than other (i. e. variation is not isotropic), and that, thus, development constraints evolution by precluding natural selection from being all-capable. This article adds to the idea that development is not compatible with the isotropic expectation by arguing that, in fact, it could not be otherwise: there is no actual reason to expect that development could lead to isotropic morphological variation. It is then argued that, since the isotropic expectation is untenable, the role of development in evolution should not be understood as a departure from such an expectation. The role of development in evolution should be described in an exclusively positive way, as the process determining which directions of morphological variation are possible, instead of negatively, as a process precluding the existence of morphological variation we have no actual reason to expect. This article discusses that this change of perspective is not a mere question of semantics: it leads to a different interpretation of the studies on developmental constraints and to a different research program in evolution and development. This program does not ask whether development constrains evolution. Instead it asks questions such as, for example, how different types of development lead to different types of morphological variation and, together with natural selection, determine the directions in which different lineages evolve.
Ayudas:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación PGC2018-096802-B-I00
Derechos:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Lengua:	Anglès
Documento:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Materia:	Developmental bias ; Morphological evolution ; Development ; Morphogenesis ; Developmental mechanisms ; Developmental constraints ; Variational properties
Publicado en:	Biology direct, Vol. 16 (January 2021) , art. 3, ISSN 1745-6150

DOI: 10.1186/s13062-020-00289-w
PMID: 33422150

13 p, 960.5 KB

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