WEST-EBERHARD, M.J.; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute: Phenotypic Accommodation: Adaptive Innovation Due to Developmental plasticity, With or Without Genetic Change

Developmental plasticity, the environmental responsiveness of an organism during ontogenetic change (development), is a universal property of living things. One result of developmental plasticity is phenotypic accommodation, or the automatic mutual adjustment among responsive structures as they interact and change during development. Phenotypic accommodation has two major consequences for the origin of adaptive novelties. First, it can exaggerate the structural consequences of a novel input, whether from the genome or the environment, resulting in a complex novelty without a correspondingly complex genetic change. Second, it can facilitate or accommodate change, including phenotypically major change that otherwise might be expected to be highly disruptive to normal development or efficient function. Phenotypic accommodation and its consequences for evolutionary theory will be discussed using examples from a variety of taxa.