Traditionally, the impact of evolution on the central nervous system has been studied by comparing the sizes of brain regions between species. However, more recent work has demonstrated that environmental factors, such as sensory experience, modulate brain region sizes intraspecifically, clouding the distinction between evolutionary and environmental sources of neuroanatomical variation in a sampled brain. Here, we review how teleost fish have played a central role in shaping this traditional understanding of brain structure evolution between species as well as the capacity for the environment to shape brain structure similarly within a species. By demonstrating that variation measured by brain region size varies similarly both inter- and intraspecifically, work on teleosts highlights the depth of the problem of studying brain evolution using neuroanatomy alone: even neurogenesis, the primary mechanism through which brain regions are thought to change size between species, also mediates experience-dependent changes within species. Here, we argue that teleost models also offer a solution to this overreliance on neuroanatomy in the study of brain evolution. With the advent of work on teleosts demonstrating interspecific evolutionary signatures in embryonic gene expression and the growing understanding of developmental neurogenesis as a multi-stepped process that may be differentially regulated between species, we argue that the tools are now in place to reframe how we compare brains between species. Future research can now transcend neuroanatomy to leverage the experimental utility of teleost fishes in order to gain deeper neurobiological insight to help us discern developmental signatures of evolutionary adaptation from phenotypic plasticity.

传统上，通过比较物种之间大脑区域的大小来研究进化对中枢神经系统的影响。但是，最近的工作表明，诸如感官体验之类的环境因素会内部地调节大脑区域的大小，从而使采样的大脑神经解剖学变异的进化和环境来源之间的区别变得模糊。在这里，我们回顾了硬骨鱼类如何在塑造对物种之间脑结构进化的传统理解以及环境对物种内相似地塑造脑结构的能力方面起着中心作用。通过证明以大脑区域大小衡量的差异在种间和种内相似地变化，关于硬骨鱼类的研究突显了仅使用神经解剖学研究大脑进化的问题的深度：甚至神经发生-人们认为大脑区域改变物种间大小的主要机制-神经发生，也介导了物种内依赖于经验的变化。在这里，我们认为硬骨动物模型还提供了一种解决大脑进化研究中对神经解剖学过度依赖的解决方案。随着硬骨鱼研究工作的到来证明了胚胎基因表达中的种间进化特征，并且对发育神经发生的认识越来越多，这一过程可能会在物种之间进行不同的调节，我们认为现在已经有了这些工具来重新构造我们的比较方法物种之间的大脑。