Developmental processes transduce diverse influences during phenotype formation, thereby biasing and structuring amount and type of phenotypic variation available for evolutionary processes to act on. The causes, extent, and consequences of this bias are subject to significant debate. Here we explore the role of developmental bias in contributing to organisms’ ability to innovate, to adapt to novel or stressful conditions, and to generate well integrated, resilient phenotypes in the face of perturbations. We focus our inquiry on one taxon, the horned dung beetle genus Onthophagus, and review the role developmental bias might play across several levels of biological organization: (a) gene regulatory networks that pattern specific body regions; (b) plastic developmental mechanisms that coordinate body wide responses to changing environments and; (c) developmental symbioses and niche construction that enable organisms to build teams and to actively modify their own selective environments. We posit that across all these levels developmental bias shapes the way living systems innovate, adapt, and withstand stress, in ways that can alternately limit, bias, or facilitate developmental evolution. We conclude that the structuring contribution of developmental bias in evolution deserves further study to better understand why and how developmental evolution unfolds the way it does.

中文翻译：

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角甲虫的发育偏见及其对创新，适应和复原力的贡献。

发育过程在表型形成过程中会传递各种影响，从而偏向和构建可用于进化过程的表型变异的数量和类型。这种偏见的原因，程度和后果尚需进行大量辩论。在这里，我们探讨了发展偏见在生物体创新能力，适应新的或压力条件以及面对扰动产生良好整合的，有弹性的表型的能力中的作用。我们将重点放在一个分类单元上，即有角的甲虫属Onthophagus，并回顾发展偏见在生物组织的多个层面上可能扮演的角色：（a）可以塑造特定身体部位的基因调控网络；（b）协调整个身体对变化的环境的反应的塑性发展机制；以及 （c）发育共生体和生态位建设，使生物体能够组建队伍并积极改变其自身的选择性环境。我们认为，在所有这些层面上，发展偏见塑造了生命系统创新，适应和承受压力的方式，可以交替限制，偏向或促进发展进化。我们得出结论，发展偏向在进化中的结构性贡献值得进一步研究，以更好地理解为什么以及如何展现发展进化的方式。