La Ecología Evolutiva del Desarrollo en México

Evolutionary biology is largely concerned with the patterns of heritable phenotypic variation within populations and its dynamics during long transgenerational time periods. Historically, population-level models in evolution have been developed under certain simplifying assumptions. Two salient assumptions are: 1) the idea of genetic change as a direct indicator of phenotypic variation, and 2) the additivity of genetic effects on the phenotype. A more faithful model of biological evolution should explicitly consider a genotype-phenotype map and back mediated by a developmental mechanism, which specifies how phenotypic variation is generated in different environments, in an analogous way to that in which positional information emerges as a result of the feedback between internal and external restrictions. A dynamic non-linear perspective is thus mandatory to understand how phenotypic variation is generated given a genetic background; or in other words, to study the mechanistic basis of the genotype-phenotype map within an ecological and evolutionary context. The field that focuses on this is Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Eco-Evo-Devo) with a systemic approach and, in Mexico, it is an emergent field. In this paper we summarize the main Eco-Evo-Devo contributions with such approach from Mexican laboratories using plants and animals. We also discuss the biomedical implications of such an approach.