Does developmental plasticity influence speciation?

人生就是一段旅程。随着年龄的增长，我们也会改变。有时我们会在一时的冲动下做出反应。偶尔，一件事会产生长期的后果，不管环境发生什么变化，都会影响我们对未来的展望。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生殖成功的体型和体重等特征。这些特征中的一些在一生中保持了灵活性，而另一些则只能在固定的早期窗口中改变。作为人类，我们更有可能在六个月前改变体重增加的轨迹，而不是在年龄较大的时候。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，从而表现出新的特征组合。作为一种创新手段，灵活性可能会促进祖先有机体向新物种的分化，但也可能不会，因为这种灵活性意味着物种已经可以应对他们遇到的任何情况，这反过来将消除任何创新固定在DNA中的压力。这种硬连接的漫长时间尺度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变化形成新的物种。在这个项目中，我们将贡献这些日益被要求的数据，从而提供第一个证据，如果一生的灵活性或顽固的拒绝改变，影响了新物种的出现。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。虽然对它们化石遗骸的化学分析产生了对过去气候变化的非常连续的记录，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。最先进的成像技术可以揭示这些成长阶段，这引发了生物学家研究地球生命的数字革命。为了研究进化，我们需要研究许多个体之间的差异。我们需要知道这些差异如何以及为什么会随着时间的推移而变化。这种需要测量大量个体的需求意味着，目前人们用手指和点击电脑屏幕来识别不同部位的做法太慢了。计算机程序现在可以提供一种更快、更可重复、更少偏见的方法来识别和分析这些部分，完善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样本来整理一个人生命之旅的记录及其经历的每一步所经历的环境，这两者都在数百万年前每天都在变化。浮游有孔虫的化石记录提供了必要的时间跨度和丰富性。新的计算机程序和成像技术完善了这一工具包，首次研究了一个人一生中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。我们独特的生物体与环境之间的直接联系使我们能够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根本限制是缺乏随着时间的推移而重复的样本来追踪新生命形式的起源，而使用来自多个科学学科的最先进的方法明确针对这一限制意味着我们将在尝试回答所有生物学问题中最基本的问题方面取得突破：个体之间的差异如何造成物种之间的差异？

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?