ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Directional selection can drive the evolution of modularity in complex traits.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 146 citations in OpenAlex.
- Rates of passerine body plan evolution in time and space.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Cranial Modularity and Integration in Modern Humans: Evidence for Regional Variability and Evolutionary Flexibility.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Module-Selection Balance in the Evolution of Modular Organisms.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Genomic perplexity and the evolution of context-dependent function.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- The evolutionary puzzle of cognition: challenges and insights from individual-based studies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Longitudinal sequencing reveals polygenic and epistatic nature of genomic response to selection.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Neutral transcriptome rewiring promotes quantitative disease resistance evolvability at the species level.The Plant cell · 2025Article
- Alternative Mutational Architectures Producing Identical M-Matrices can Lead to Different Patterns of Evolutionary Divergence.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Macroevolution along developmental lines of least resistance in fly wings.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Transitions Into Freezing Environments Linked With Shifts in Phylogenetic Integration Between Vitaceae Leaf Traits.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Genetic regulators of a resource polyphenism interact to couple predatory morphology and behaviour.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The evolution of genetic covariance and modularity as a result of multigenerational environmental fluctuation.Evolution letters · 2023Article
- Rules of teeth development align microevolution with macroevolution in extant and extinct primates.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Diversity and genetic architecture of agro-morphological traits in a core collection of European traditional tomato.Journal of experimental botany · 2023Article
- Genetic influences on dentognathic morphology in the Jirel population of Nepal.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2022Article
- Experimental evolution of a pheromone signal.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Development and function explain the modular evolution of phalanges in gecko lizards.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Geographic variation in the skulls of the horseshoe bats,Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Genome-wide scans for signatures of selection in Mangalarga Marchador horses using high-throughput SNP genotyping.BMC genomics · 2021Article
- Correlational selection in the age of genomics.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Modularity is a central concept in modern biology, providing a powerful framework for the study of living organisms on many organizational levels. Two central and related questions can be posed in regard to modularity: How does modularity appear in the first place, and what forces are responsible for keeping and/or changing modular patterns? We approached these questions using a quantitative genetics simulation framework, building on previous results obtained with bivariate systems and extending them to multivariate systems. We developed an individual-based model capable of simulating many traits controlled by many loci with variable pleiotropic relations between them, expressed in populations subject to mutation, recombination, drift, and selection. We used this model to study the problem of the emergence of modularity, and hereby show that drift and stabilizing selection are inefficient at creating modular variational structures. We also demonstrate that directional selection can have marked effects on the modular structure between traits, actively promoting a restructuring of genetic variation in the selected population and potentially facilitating the response to selection. Furthermore, we give examples of complex covariation created by simple regimes of combined directional and stabilizing selection and show that stabilizing selection is important in the maintenance of established covariation patterns. Our results are in full agreement with previous results for two-trait systems and further extend them to include scenarios of greater complexity. Finally, we discuss the evolutionary consequences of modular patterns being molded by directional selection.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.