The macroevolutionary consequences of phenotypic integration: from development to deep time

By A. Goswami, Jeroen B. Smaers, C. Soligo, P. D. Polly. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2014

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Phenotypic integration is a pervasive characteristic of organisms. Numerous analyses have demonstrated that patterns of phenotypic integration are conserved across large clades, but that significant variation also exists. For example, heterochronic shifts related to different mammalian reproductive strategies are reflected in postcranial skeletal integration and in coordination of bone ossification. Phenotypic integration and modularity have been hypothesized to shape morphological evolution, and we extended simulations to confirm that trait integration can influence both the trajectory and magnitude of response to selection. We further demonstrate that phenotypic integration can produce both more and less disparate organisms than would be expected under random walk models by repartitioning variance in preferred directions. This effect can also be expected to favour homoplasy and convergent evolution. New empirical analyses of the carnivoran cranium show that rates of evolution, in contrast, are not strongly influenced by phenotypic integration and show little relationship to morphological disparity, suggesting that phenotypic integration may shape the direction of evolutionary change, but not necessarily the speed of it. Nonetheless, phenotypic integration is problematic for morphological clocks and should be incorporated more widely into models that seek to accurately reconstruct both trait and organismal evolution.

Subfields: Ecology, Geometry and Topology, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a67170ab450a8ea5b3f7bd3775807fe70a244888

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. G. Escarguel
2. G. Merceron
3. J. Scott

In Geometry and Topology

1. G. Escarguel
2. G. Merceron
3. J. Clavel

In Paleontology

1. G. Escarguel
2. G. Merceron
3. J. Clavel
4. J. Scott

Citations in the corpus

• Evaluating modularity in morphometric data: challenges with the RV coefficient and a new test measure (2016, unknown): “…decipher how these trends differ across levels of biological organization (e.g., Bookstein et al. 2003; Young & Badyaev 2006; Jamniczky & Halligrimsson 2009; Drake & Klingenberg 2010; Ivanovic & Kalezic 2010; Kolbe et al. ; Renaud, Alibert & Auffray 2012; Sanger et al. 2012; Goswami et al. 2014).”
• Analyzing Fluctuating Asymmetry with Geometric Morphometrics: Concepts, Methods, and Applications (2015, unknown): “geometric morphometrics [172,422–424].”
• mvmorph: an r package for fitting multivariate evolutionary models to morphometric data (2015, background): “…2001; Step-pan, Phillips & Houle 2002) and has led to particular expectations over macroevolutionary times (e.g. Schluter 1996; Steppan 1997; Arnold, Pfrender & Jones 2001; Baker & Wil-kinson 2003; Polly 2004; Hohenlohe & Arnold 2008; Revell & Harmon 2008; Shoval et al. 2012; Goswami et al. 2014).”