Time's arrow: heterochrony and the evolution of development.

The concept of heterochrony, which denotes a change in the relative timing of developmental events and processes in evolution, has accompanied attempts to link evolution and development for well over a century. During this time the definition of heterochrony and the application of the concept have varied and by the late 1990's, many questioned the usefulness of the concept. However, in the past decade studies of heterochrony have been revitalized by a new focus on developmental sequence, an examination of heterochrony in explicit phylogenetic contexts and increasing tendencies to examine the heterochrony of many kinds of events, including cellular, molecular and genetic events. Examples of such studies are reviewed in this paper and it is argued that this new application of heterochrony provides an extraordinarily rich opportunity for understanding the developmental basis of evolutionary change.

• Publication year

  2003

• Venue

  International Journal of Developmental Biology

• Publication date

  2003-12-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1387/IJDB.14756337PMID 14756337
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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