Abstract
Evolution of diet-derived sexual ornaments-some of the most spectacular and diverse traits in the living world-highlights the gap between modern evolutionary theory and empirical data on the origin and inheritance of complex environment-dependent traits. Specifically, current theory offers little insight into how strong environmental contingency of diet-dependent color biosynthesis and environmental variability in precursor supply can be reconciled with extensive evolutionary elaboration, diversification, and convergence of diet-dependent displays among animal taxa. Moreover, biosynthetic pathways of diet-derived displays combine seemingly irreconcilable robustness, lability, and modularity to facilitate elaboration under variable environmental conditions. Here I show that an ontogenetic decrease in the predictability of an association between organismal and environmental components of color biosynthesis and the corresponding evolutionary transition from short-term epigenetic inheritance of peripheral biosynthetic components to genetic inheritance of the most reliable upstream components link the causes of developmental variation with the causes of inheritance in diet-derived displays. Using carotenoid-based colors as an empirical model, I outline general principles of a testable evolutionary framework of diversification and functional robustness of diet-derived displays, and suggest that such a framework provides insight into the foundational question of evolutionary biology-how to connect causes of within-generation developmental variation with causes of among-generation and among-taxa variation and thus with causes of evolution?
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 61-71 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Evolutionary Biology |
Volume | 34 |
Issue number | 1-2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 2007 |
Keywords
- Carotenoids
- Color displays
- Complexity
- Development
- Evolution
- Inheritance
- Robustness
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics