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Figures
Denis Noble discusses Conrad Waddington's classic paper, ‘The genetic assimilation of the bithorax phenotype’, published in Evolution in 1956.
- Fig. 1.
Waddington's developmental landscape diagram. The landscape itself and the ball at the top are from his original diagram. The subsequent positions of the ball have been added to illustrate his point that development can be canalised to follow different routes (A and B). The plasticity to enable this to happen already exists in the wild population of organisms (modified diagram by K. Mitchell).
- Fig. 2.
Waddington's diagram to show how the developmental landscape relates to individual genes (bottom pegs) through networks of interactions in the organism. Since he also showed the influence of the external environment on canalisation of development, I have extended the diagram by adding the top part to represent the environmental influences. It is the combination of these influences that can lead to an evolutionary change without mutations (modified from Waddington, 1957).
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