Berta Verd

Evolving phenotypic diversity without evolving the Waddingtonian

Berta Verd

University of Oxford, UK

e-mail: berta.verdfernandez@biology.ox.ac.uk

Waddington’s landscape provides a powerful tool to visualise and understand the properties of developmental trajectories, and how these can change over the course of evolution. Oftentimes, this framework has led us to imagine that changes to the geometry and topology of the Waddingtonian might be underlying the evolution of developmental trajectories leading to phenotypic change. However, our recent work on the evolution of vertebral counts using closely related cichlid species has highlighted that phenotypes might evolve by changing the initial conditions rather than the Waddigntonian itself, making it no less useful in shaping our intuition surrounding the evolution and evolvability of developmental processes.