Moreover, their relatively small cost permits to rapidly implement a prototype design without major developmental constraints.
Organisms are often prevented from evolving into identical forms by developmental constraints and by the contingencies of their evolutionary history.
The debate over developmental constraints looked at developmental biology solely from the perspective of whether it could provide answers to evolutionary questions.
Under the assumption that strong developmental constraints occur during the phylotypic stage, they predict that genes conserved among vertebrates would be highly constrained during the phylotypic stage.
This suggests that developmental constraints are more important than the competitive position in determining the crown architecture of the two species.
New work by de Winter and Oxnard rules out the possibility that developmental constraints are the sole explanation for mammalian brain evolution.
Many biologists that analyze the evolution of development or "evo-devo" use a different set of molecular and morphological investigative techniques to uncover robust and important developmental constraints (see, e.g., Müller and Newman 2003, Kirschner and Gerhart 2005).
Riedl didn't think that this pattern is just because selection was sorting the phenotypic variants, but that it mirrored the mutations, namely that mutational pattern was structured by the internal developmental constraints.
Alternative mechanisms, collectively known as "non-adaptive" factors, include concepts such as genetic drift and developmental constraints, among others (Gould and Lewontin 1979; Nickels et al. 1996; Gould 2002).
Additionally, it is unclear whether teachers incorporated developmental constraints, or other lesser-known non-adaptive factors (see Gould 2002), into their teaching in all the biology classes or if it was only found in the evolution course.
Natural selection for larger body size on the basis of larger individuals being more effective predators or acquiring better territories relative to smaller individuals, or developmental constraints related to limitations on organ function at very small sizes.
