Facilitation of Evolution by Plasticity Scales with Phenotypic Complexity.
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Developmental plasticity enables organisms to cope with new environmental challenges. If deploying such plasticity is costly in terms of time or energy, the same adaptive behaviour could subsequently evolve through piecemeal genomic reorganisation that replaces the requirement to acquire that adaptation by individual plasticity. Here, we report a new dimension to the way in which plasticity can drive evolutionary change, leading to an ever-greater complexity in biological organisation. Plasticity dramatically accelerates the evolutionary accumulation of adaptive systems in model organisms with relatively low rates of mutation. The effect of plasticity on the evolutionary growth of complexity is even greater when the number of elements needed to construct a functional system is increased. These results suggest that, as the difficulty of challenges from the environment becomes greater, plasticity exerts an ever more powerful role in meeting those challenges and in opening up new avenues for the subsequent evolution of complex adaptations.
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Peer reviewed: True
Acknowledgements: The publication of this article is dedicated to the memory of Patrick Bateson. Most of the work was done in 2007–2008 when the K.A. and M.B. visited Cambridge to work with P.B. on a grant from the Royal Society. We also want to thank Eva Jablonka for fruitful discussions of our work from its very beginning. This publication closely follows the final draft discussed with P.B. in January 2014; unfortunately, the work was not submitted for publication after that. For us (M.B. and K.A.), Pat was not only an academic peer but also a friend. His passion for science and for hard questions of animal biology not only guided this work but also gave us a much deeper view of the foundational problems on the intersection of evolution, development, behaviour, and learning.
Publication status: Published
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2076-2615
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