A development-centric perspective on pace-of-life syndromes

2024/12/26 by Isabel M. Smallegange, Anja Guenther · 1 voice · 2 citations
Psychology · Neuroscience · #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Eating Disorders and Behaviors #Circadian rhythm and melatonin

paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/evlett/qrae069

openalex publication_date 2024/12/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/23

Abstract

Organism responses to environmental change require coordinated changes across correlated traits, so-called syndromes. For example, animals differ in their "pace-of-life syndrome" (POLS); suites of correlated life-history, behavioral and physiological traits. But standard "gene-centric" evolutionary theory cannot explain why POLSs exist because it assumes that the expression of phenotypic traits of animals is determined by genotype-specified reaction norms; it ignores that developmental processes can bias the direction of evolution so that phenotypes no longer match genotype-by-environment interactions. Here we apply a development-centric perspective to derive new POLS hypotheses that can resolve the conflict that current POLS predictions fail to explain which species/populations are resilient to environmental change.

Citations

• The Island Syndrome in Rodent Populations
• Twenty years on from <i>Developmental Plasticity and Evolution</i>: middle-range theories and how to test them

Cited by

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Discussions

• A development-centric perspective on pace-of-life syndromes doi.org/10.1093/evle... Now in @evolletters.bsky.social by Isabel M Smallegange and Anja Guenther. [bsky, 5 points, 0 comments]

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