How development may direct evolution

Biology and Philosophy 18 (2):353-370 (2003)
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Abstract

A framework is presented in which the role ofdevelopmental rules in phenotypic evolution canbe studied for some simple situations. Usingtwo different implicit models of development,characterized by different developmental mapsfrom genotypes to phenotypes, it is shown bysimulation that developmental rules and driftcan result in directional phenotypic evolutionwithout selection. For both models thesimulations show that the critical parameterthat drives the final phenotypic distributionis the cardinality of the set of genotypes thatmap to each phenotype. Details of thedevelopmental map do not matter. If phenotypesare randomly assigned to genotypes, the lastresult can also be proved analytically.

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Author Profiles

Linton Wang
National Chung Cheng University
Sahotra Sarkar
University of Texas at Austin
Justin Garson
Hunter College (CUNY)

Citations of this work

Formal Darwinism: Some questions.Sahotra Sarkar - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (2):249-257.
The return of the embryo.Alan C. Love - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):567-584.

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