Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 What is an animal?
- 2 Before there were animals
- 3 How to make a fossil
- 4 The Cambrian explosion
- 5 How to make a species
- 6 Jellyfish and their kin
- 7 How to make a tree
- 8 The enigmatic urbilaterian
- 9 Animal symmetry and heads
- 10 A plethora of worms
- 11 Trends in animal complexity
- 12 Where the octopus is king
- 13 How to make an animal
- 14 Exoskeletons galore
- 15 Extinction
- 16 Mouth first, mouth second
- 17 Comparing embryos
- 18 Larvae, mouthparts and moulting
- 19 The animal toolkit
- 20 Vertebrate origins and evolution
- 21 From water to land to water
- 22 Variation and inheritance
- 23 Evolutionary novelties
- 24 Human origins and evolution
- 25 Animal plasticity
- 26 The nature of adaptation
- 27 The direction of evolution
- 28 Animal extremophiles
- 29 Extraterrestrial animals?
- 30 The ghost in the machine
- Appendix
- References
- Index
25 - Animal plasticity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 What is an animal?
- 2 Before there were animals
- 3 How to make a fossil
- 4 The Cambrian explosion
- 5 How to make a species
- 6 Jellyfish and their kin
- 7 How to make a tree
- 8 The enigmatic urbilaterian
- 9 Animal symmetry and heads
- 10 A plethora of worms
- 11 Trends in animal complexity
- 12 Where the octopus is king
- 13 How to make an animal
- 14 Exoskeletons galore
- 15 Extinction
- 16 Mouth first, mouth second
- 17 Comparing embryos
- 18 Larvae, mouthparts and moulting
- 19 The animal toolkit
- 20 Vertebrate origins and evolution
- 21 From water to land to water
- 22 Variation and inheritance
- 23 Evolutionary novelties
- 24 Human origins and evolution
- 25 Animal plasticity
- 26 The nature of adaptation
- 27 The direction of evolution
- 28 Animal extremophiles
- 29 Extraterrestrial animals?
- 30 The ghost in the machine
- Appendix
- References
- Index
Summary
We can generalize the point made in the last chapter about the role of environmental factors in determining human height to the role of these factors in determining the body sizes of most if not all animals. Indeed, we can generalize further, because environmental factors play a role in determining the values of many characters in most or all animals, including those that are unrelated to size. In other words, the genes do not completely determine the course of development; rather, this course is set by a mixture of genetic and environmental influences, and the interactions between them.
There are several ways of describing the effects of environmental factors on development. One way is to say that a character such as body size upon whose value there is an environmental influence has only a partial heritability. Another is to say that there is an element of plasticity in the character concerned. More complete terms for the latter are phenotypic plasticity or developmental plasticity, the second term being preferable for reasons already given in Chapter 22.
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- Information
- Evolving AnimalsThe Story of our Kingdom, pp. 251 - 261Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014