Читать книгу Systematics and the Exploration of Life - Группа авторов - Страница 20

The symmetry of biological forms, initially an object of curiosity and fascination, has become an important research topic in several branches of biological sciences in recent decades. The understanding of the developmental processes involved in the morphogenesis of symmetric phenotypes is a major issue in developmental and evolutionary biology (see Citerne et al. (2010), for example). In parallel to these genetic and developmental approaches, morphometrics has established a rigorous methodological framework for the analysis of symmetric shapes. Beyond the characterization of the symmetry of shapes, these approaches also quantify the deviations from the symmetric expectation. Their statistical analysis allows inferences to be made with regards to the architecture of complex phenotypes (genetic modularity, developmental modularity) and their variational properties (evolutionary modularity, evolvability). Coupled with molecular and developmental approaches, the recent generalization of the morphometric framework to all types of symmetry thus opens up new ways to describe, study and understand the origin and evolution of symmetries in the living world.