La Ecología Evolutiva del Desarrollo en México

Abstract

Evolutionary biology is largely concerned with the patterns of heritable phenotypic variation within populations and its dynamics during long transgenerational time periods. Historically, population-level models in evolution have been developed under certain simplifying assumptions. Two salient assumptions are: 1) the idea of genetic change as a direct indicator of phenotypic variation, and 2) the additivity of genetic effects on the phenotype. A more faithful model of biological evolution should explicitly consider a genotype-phenotype map and back mediated by a developmental mechanism, which specifies how phenotypic variation is generated in different environments, in an analogous way to that in which positional information emerges as a result of the feedback between internal and external restrictions. A dynamic non-linear perspective is thus mandatory to understand how phenotypic variation is generated given a genetic background; or in other words, to study the mechanistic basis of the genotype-phenotype map within an ecological and evolutionary context. The field that focuses on this is Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Eco-Evo-Devo) with a systemic approach and, in Mexico, it is an emergent field. In this paper we summarize the main Eco-Evo-Devo contributions with such approach from Mexican laboratories using plants and animals. We also discuss the biomedical implications of such an approach.