Description: The OVAL Window is a bi-weekly science blog exploring and reporting on research in anatomy, evolution, and genetics.
The OVAL Window is a bi-weekly science blog exploring and reporting on research in anatomy, evolution, and genetics.
One of the challenges of understanding evolution is determining what makes a trait meaningful for a research question. Quantitative genetics literature in general gives limited guidance on this point, as any quantitative trait simply needs to be a quantifiable quality of an organism, and not a discrete class; it needs to have a continuous distribution and be measurable on a scale. For a trait to be applicable to evolutionary quantitative inquiry, it needs to be heritable. What often is missed is that the de
In my last post, I introduced the concept of a morphospace – the bounded range of possible shape variation that exists for a given trait in either one population of organisms or a trait shared by several related populations of organisms. Morphospaces are crucial to understanding morphological (shape) variation in two important ways: 1) determining how past evolutionary forces have acted to produce a particular morphology, and 2) predicting how current and future evolutionary forces will alter that morpholo