Speaker
Description
Our understanding of adaptive evolution is grounded in a deterministic view of genetic variants. Yet development takes shape through the interaction of an organism’s genotype with its environment, an interaction that can be surprisingly complex both within and across generations. How does this causal entanglement change our view of evolution? Ecological developmental biology explicitly examines phenotypic expression in environmental context. A suite of within- and trans-generational ‘eco-devo’ experiments with annual plants provides a case study that reveals the repertoires of adaptive and maladaptive plasticity inherent in individual genotypes, and points to newly expanded answers to three fundamental evolutionary questions: the nature of adaptation, the kind of biological information that is inherited, and how to define --and study—the process of evolutionary change.
