ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Complex constraints on allometry revealed by artificial selection on the wing of Drosophila melanogaster.
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 53 papers.
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53 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Complex Interplay between Evolutionary Flexibility and Diversification in a Family of Spiders.Systematic biology · 2026Article
- Passage-Dependent Size Distributions of Human-Derived Cells: Implications for Metabolic Assays.FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology · 2026Article
- Macroevolution of Steep Interspecific Metabolic Allometry in an Old Insect Order.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Body size, wing area, and wing loading follow a pattern of trait conservatism inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Co-variation and trade-offs in ontogenetic scaling of growth and metabolic rates in teleost fish.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Evolvability: progress and key questions.Bioscience · 2025Review
- Conserved wing shape variation across biological scales unveils dialectical relationships between micro- and macroevolution.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Experimental demonstration of allometric invariance of plant response to density over the course of wheat domestication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Macroevolution along developmental lines of least resistance in fly wings.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Long-term increases in wing length occur independently of changes in climate and climate-driven shifts in body size.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Insect Flight Energetics and the Evolution of Size, Form, and Function.Integrative and comparative biology · 2024Review
- Ecological implications of allometric relationships in American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Experimental evidence for adaptive divergence in response to a warmed habitat reveals roles for morphology, allometry and parasite resistance.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Detecting natural selection in trait-trait coevolution.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Conical and sabertoothed cats as an exception to craniofacial evolutionary allometry.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Strong positive allometry of bite force in leaf-cutter ants increases the range of cuttable plant tissues.The Journal of experimental biology · 2023Article
- Developmental bias predicts 60 million years of wing shape evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
- Sexual size and shape dimorphism, and allometric scaling in the pupal and adult traits ofEcology and evolution · 2023Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Precise exponential scaling with size is a fundamental aspect of phenotypic variation. These allometric power laws are often invariant across taxa and have long been hypothesized to reflect developmental constraints. Here we test this hypothesis by investigating the evolutionary potential of an allometric scaling relationship in drosophilid wing shape that is nearly invariant across 111 species separated by at least 50 million years of evolution. In only 26 generations of artificial selection in a population of Drosophila melanogaster, we were able to drive the allometric slope to the outer range of those found among the 111 sampled species. This response was rapidly lost when selection was suspended. Only a small proportion of this reversal could be explained by breakup of linkage disequilibrium, and direct selection on wing shape is also unlikely to explain the reversal, because the more divergent wing shapes produced by selection on the allometric intercept did not revert. We hypothesize that the reversal was instead caused by internal selection arising from pleiotropic links to unknown traits. Our results also suggest that the observed selection response in the allometric slope was due to a component expressed late in larval development and that variation in earlier development did not respond to selection. Together, these results are consistent with a role for pleiotropic constraints in explaining the remarkable evolutionary stability of allometric scaling.
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