The Developmental Genetics of Brain-Body Allometry

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One of the most ubiquitous features of organismal variation is that shape correlates with size 1. This allometric variation is an example of integration or the tendency for traits to covary. Integration combined with genetic variation results in covariation among traits that enables but also restricts phenotypic responses to selection. Integration occurs when developmental processes drive variation in multiple traits. By channeling genetic and environmental influences, integration imparts structure on phenotypic covariation. Understanding this structure is key to one of the most difficult problems in modern biology – how development translates genetic to phenotypic variation in complex traits – a question to which modern genomic approaches have not yielded satisfactory answers.