Effects of environmental perturbations during postnatal development on the phenotypic integration of the skull
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Integration and modularity are fundamental determinants of how natural selection effects evolutionary change in complex multivariate traits. Interest in the study of the specific developmental basis of integration through experimental approaches is fairly recent and it has mainly focused on its genetic determinants. In this study, we present evidence that postnatal environmental perturbations can modify the covariance structure by influencing the variance of some developmental processes relative to the variances of other processes that contribute to such structure. We analyzed the effects of the reduction of nutrient supply in different ontogenetic stages (i.e. before and after weaning, and from birth to adulthood) in Rattus norvegicus. Our results show that this environmental perturbation alters the phenotypic variation/covariation structure of the principal modules of the skull (base, vault, and face). The covariance matrices of different treatment groups exhibit low correlations and are significantly different, indicating that the treatments influence covariance structure. Postnatal nutrient restriction also increases the variance of somatic growth. This increased variance drives an increase in overall integration of cranial morphology through the correlated allometric effects of size variation. The extent of this increase in integration depends on the time and duration of the nutritional restriction. These results support the conclusion that environmental perturbations can influence integration and thus covariance structure via developmental plasticity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".