Does developmental plasticity influence speciation?

人生是一场旅行。随着年龄的增长，我们也在改变。有时我们会一时冲动做出反应。有时候，一个事件会产生长期的影响，尽管环境发生了变化，并塑造了我们对未来的看法。这种未来的灵活性，或缺乏这种灵活性，也适用于影响我们日常死亡风险和繁殖成功率的体型和体重等特征。其中一些特征在一生中保持灵活性，而另一些特征只能在固定的早期窗口内改变。作为人类，我们在6个月前比长大后更有可能改变体重增加的轨迹。任何灵活调整特征的能力都可以提高在新的或不断变化的环境中的生存机会，但也提供了创新的手段，从而表达新的特征组合。灵活性作为一种创新手段可能会促进祖先生物分化为新物种，但也可能不会，因为这种灵活性意味着物种已经能够应对它们遇到的任何环境，这反过来又会消除任何创新成为其DNA固有的压力。这种硬接线的时间跨度太长，使数据收集变得复杂。我们不知道未来的灵活性或缺乏灵活性更有可能催化新物种的变化。在这个项目中，我们将提供越来越需要的数据，从而提供第一个证据，证明一生的灵活性，或者顽固地拒绝改变，会影响新物种的出现。浮游有孔虫是一种单细胞生物，大量生活在世界上所有的海洋中。虽然对化石残骸的化学分析产生了过去气候变化的显著连续记录，但每个个体也保留了其生命旅程中每个阶段的大小和形状的完整记录。这些生长阶段可以通过最先进的成像技术揭示出来，这引发了生物学家研究地球生命的一场数字革命。为了研究进化，我们需要研究大量个体之间的差异。我们需要知道这些差异是如何以及为什么随着时间而变化的。这种需要测量大量个体的做法意味着，目前人们通过手指和点击电脑屏幕来识别不同部位的做法太慢了。计算机程序提供了一种更快、更可重复、更少偏见的方法来识别和分析这些部件，现在已经可用，完成了建立大型数据库所需的工具包。通过汇集不同科学学科的经验教训，我们建议使用相同的化石标本来整理个体的生命历程和每一步所经历的环境记录，这两者在数百万年前每天都在变化。虽然浮游有孔虫的化石记录提供了必要的时间跨度和数量，但新的计算机程序和成像技术完成了工具包拼图，以便首次调查个体生命旅程的某些部分是否比其他部分在决定其物种的最终进化目的地方面更具影响力。我们在生物和环境之间独特而直接的联系，让我们在化石记录的静态死亡中，研究生命的动态旅程。我们目前研究新物种如何出现的方法的根本限制是缺乏随时间重复的样本来追踪新生命形式的起源，并且明确地利用来自多个科学学科的最先进的方法来针对这一限制意味着我们将在试图回答所有生物学问题中最基本的问题之一方面取得突破：个体之间的差异如何导致物种之间的差异？

Life is a journey. As we grow older, we change. Sometimes we respond in the spur of the moment. Occasionally, an event has long-lasting consequences in spite of any change in circumstance and shapes our outlook far into the future.This future flexibility, or a lack thereof, also applies to the traits like size and weight that influence our daily risk of death and our reproductive success. Some of these traits retain flexibility throughout life, whereas others can only change in a fixed early window. As humans, we are far more likely to shift weight gain trajectories before six months of age than when older. Any ability to flexibly adjust traits can boost survival chances in new or changing environments, but also provides the means to innovate and so express new combinations of traits. Flexibility as a means of innovation might promote the divergence of ancestral organisms into new species, but also might not because such flexibility would mean that species can already deal with whatever circumstances they encounter, which would in turn remove the pressure for any innovation to become hardwired into their DNA.The long timescales over which this hardwiring plays out complicates collection of data. We don't know whether future flexibility or a lack of it is more likely to catalyse change into new species. In this project, we will contribute this increasingly requested data and therefore provide the first evidence if a lifetime of flexibility, or a stubborn refusal to change, influences the emergence of new species. Planktonic foraminifera are single-celled organisms that live in vast numbers in all the world's oceans. While chemical analysis of their fossil remains has generated a remarkably continuous record of past climate change, each individual also retains a complete record of its size and shape at each stage along its journey through life. These growth stages can be revealed by state-of-the-art imaging technology, which has sparked a digital revolution in how biologists study life on Earth. To study evolution, we need to study differences among lots of individuals. We need to know how and why these differences change through time. This need to measure lots of individuals means that the current practise of a person pointing and clicking on a computer screen to identify distinct parts is too slow. Computer programmes that provide a faster, more repeatable and less biased way of identifying and analysing such parts are now available, completing the toolkit needed to build big databases.By bringing together lessons from diverse scientific disciplines, we propose to use the same fossil specimens to collate records of an individual's journey through life and the environment it experienced every step of the way, both of which were changing from day-to-day, millions of years ago.While the fossil record of planktonic foraminifera provides the necessary timespan and abundance, new computer programmes and imaging technology complete the toolkit jigsaw to investigate for the first time if certain parts of an individual's journey through life are more influential than others in determining the eventual evolutionary destinations of its species. Our unique, direct link between organism and environment lets us study the dynamic journey through life in the static death of the fossil record. The fundamental limitation to the current ways we study how new species emerge is the lack of repeated samples through time to follow the genesis of novel lifeforms, and explicitly targeting this limitation using state-of-the-art approaches from multiple scientific disciplines means we will deliver a breakthrough in attempts to answer one of the most fundamental of all biological questions: how do differences among individuals make differences among species?