A recurrent theme in evolutionary biology is to contrast natural selection and developmental constraint – two forces pitted against each other as competing explanations for organismal form. A recent Perspective in the journal Genetics explains why this juxtaposition is deeply misleading. There is also a blog about the paper here.
Our starting point is that characters often evolve through changes in how genes, cells, and tissues regulate each other. Once we study the evolution of such regulatory interactions, it turns out that they do not only limit evolution, but also may facilitate the capacity to adapt and diversify. The paper gives an introduction to recent theoretical and empirical research, and explains how this work is now beginning to reveal how evolution of the evolutionary process itself contributes to diversification and adaptation.