Developmental plasticity looks like a promising bridge between ecological and developmental perspectives on evolution. Yet, there is no consensus on whether plasticity is part of the explanation for adaptive evolution or an optional “add‐on” to genes and natural selection. Here, we suggest that these differences in opinion are caused by differences in the simplifying assumptions, and particular idealizations, that enable evolutionary explanation. We outline why idealizations designed to explain evolution through natural selection prevent an understanding of the role of development, and vice versa. We show that representing plasticity as a reaction norm conforms with the idealizations of selective explanations, which can give the false impression that plasticity has no explanatory power for adaptive evolution. Finally, we use examples to illustrate why evolutionary explanations that include developmental plasticity may in fact be more satisfactory than explanations that solely refer to genes and natural selection.

中文翻译：

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发展可塑性和进化解释。

发展可塑性似乎是生态和发展观点之间的有希望的桥梁。然而，对于可塑性是适应性进化的解释的一部分还是基因和自然选择的可选“附加”的解释尚无共识。在这里，我们建议这些观点上的差异是由简化假设和特定理想化的差异引起的，这些差异使得能够进行进化解释。我们概述了为什么通过自然选择来解释进化的理想化阻止了对发展角色的理解，反之亦然。我们表明，将可塑性表示为反应范式符合选择性解释的理想化，这可能会给人一种错误的印象，即可塑性没有适应性进化的解释力。最后，