ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
A theoretical perspective on Waddington's genetic assimilation experiments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolution of phenocopying in a dynamical model of developmental trajectories.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Environmentally dependent developmental induction as a potential driver of heart evolution.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Article
- Dynamical systems of fate and form in development.Seminars in cell & developmental biology · 2025Review
- Soft Modes as a Predictive Framework for Low-Dimensional Biological Systems Across Scales.Annual review of biophysics · 2025Review
- A mechanistic basis for genetic assimilation in natural fly populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Stochastic morphological swings inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Soft Modes as a Predictive Framework for Low Dimensional Biological Systems across Scales.ArXiv · 2024Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Genetic assimilation is the process by which a phenotype that is initially induced by an environmental stimulus becomes stably inherited in the absence of the stimulus after a few generations of selection. While the concept has attracted much debate after being introduced by C. H. Waddington 70 y ago, there have been few experiments to quantitatively characterize the phenomenon. Here, we revisit and organize the results of Waddington's original experiments and follow-up studies that attempted to replicate his results. We then present a theoretical model to illustrate the process of genetic assimilation and highlight several aspects that we think require further quantitative studies, including the gradual increase of penetrance, the statistics of delay in assimilation, and the frequency of unviability during selection. Our model captures Waddington's picture of developmental paths in a canalized landscape using a stochastic dynamical system with alternative trajectories that can be controlled by either external signals or internal variables. It also reconciles two descriptions of the phenomenon-Waddington's, expressed in terms of an individual organism's developmental paths, and that of Bateman in terms of the population distribution crossing a hypothetical threshold. Our results provide theoretical insight into the concepts of canalization, phenotypic plasticity, and genetic assimilation.
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