Twenty years on from Developmental Plasticity and Evolution: middle-range theories and how to test them

In Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, Mary-Jane West-Eberhard argued that the developmental mechanisms that enable organisms to respond to their environment are fundamental causes of adaptation and diversification. Twenty years after publication of this book, this once so highly controversial claim appears to have been assimilated by a wealth of studies on ‘plasticity-led’ evolution. However, we suggest that the role of development in explanations for adaptive evolution remains underappreciated in this body of work. By combining concepts of evolvability from evolutionary developmental biology and quantitative genetics, we outline a framework that is more appropriate to identify developmental causes of adaptive evolution. This framework demonstrates how experimental and comparative developmental biology and physiology can be leveraged to put the role of plasticity in evolution to the test.