ArticleEvolutionary biology2009
Deciphering the Palimpsest: Studying the Relationship Between Morphological Integration and Phenotypic Covariation.
Article in Evolutionary biology, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 165 papers.
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Who cites it
165 citing papers in PubMed.
- Role of soft tissue and bone interactions in the developmental integration and modularity of the skull in neural crest-specific gap junction alpha-1 knockout mice.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Navigating the window: structural bottlenecks in avian craniofacial integration revealed by the ontogenetic patterning of shape variance.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Shared genetic basis and structure of syndromic and normal facial variation.American journal of human genetics · 2026Article
- Divergent evolutionary trajectories of male and female investment in the Brassicaceae.Annals of botany · 2026Article
- Cranial Modularity and Integration in Modern Humans: Evidence for Regional Variability and Evolutionary Flexibility.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Phenotypic integration and the organization of discrete facial variation.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Bridging developmental and statistical approaches to variation and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Dynamic Morphospaces for Animal Locomotion: A Case Study in Bird Flight.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Review
- Revisiting the Palimpsest: Exploring the Interaction of the Variance and Structure of Developmental Determinants of Phenotypic Covariance.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- You Should Look a Gift Ungulate in the Mouth: Using 2D Occlusal Cheek Tooth Morphology to Study the Evolution of Molarization in Ungulates.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2026Article
- Topological and variational modularity: A case study using the pectoral girdle across the Chrosomus eos-neogaeus hybridization complex.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Is the human chin a spandrel? Insights from an evolutionary analysis of ape craniomandibular form.PloS one · 2026Article
- Evolvability: progress and key questions.Bioscience · 2025Review
- Comparative study of fetal facial shape between Japanese and North American populations using micro-CT.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Functional trait network analysis in birds.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Great expectations: altricial developmental strategies are associated with more flexible evolution of limb skeleton proportions in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Incorporating Evolutionary Theory Into Forensic Anthropology Methods and Practice: A Proof-of-Concept Study Using Skeletal Sex Estimation.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Gene-environment interactions modulate the phenotype severity in mouse models of congenital craniofacial syndromes.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2025Article
- Developmental and Functional Interactions Structure Patterns of Variational Modularity in the Lunar Wrasse Skull.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Article
- Dosage-dependent effects of FGFR2Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Article
105 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Organisms represent a complex arrangement of anatomical structures and individuated parts that must maintain functional associations through development. This integration of variation between functionally related body parts and the modular organization of development are fundamental determinants of their evolvability. This is because integration results in the expression of coordinated variation that can create preferred directions for evolutionary change, while modularity enables variation in a group of traits or regions to accumulate without deleterious effects on other aspects of the organism. Using our own work on both model systems (e.g., lab mice, avians) and natural populations of rodents and primates, we explore in this paper the relationship between patterns of phenotypic covariation and the developmental determinants of integration that those patterns are assumed to reflect. We show that integration cannot be reliably studied through phenotypic covariance patterns alone and argue that the relationship between phenotypic covariation and integration is obscured in two ways. One is the superimposition of multiple determinants of covariance in complex systems and the other is the dependence of covariation structure on variances in covariance-generating processes. As a consequence, we argue that the direct study of the developmental determinants of integration in model systems is necessary to fully interpret patterns of covariation in natural populations, to link covariation patterns to the processes that generate them, and to understand their significance for evolutionary explanation.
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