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CRiSM Seminar - Pat Carter (WSU, Biology)

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Location: A1.01

Pat Carter (WSU, Biology)
Evolution of Biological Shape: A Function-Valued Approach

Many traits of central importance in biology are function-valued; that is, they can be described as a mathematical function of an independent index. Growth curves (size as a function of age), ontogenies (e.g., gene expression as a function of age), reaction norms (e.g., trout swim performance as a function of temperature) and morphological shapes (e.g., location on a fly wing as a function of angle from the centroid) are all examples of function-valued (FV) traits. Treating such a trait explicitly as a function provides greater conceptual and statistical power than treating it as a series of separate and putatively independent traits. Interest in the selection and evolution of FV traits has accelerated in recent years as advances in data acquisition technology have resulted in the production of large data sets and by recent advances in theoretical, statistical and empirical work as more biologists focus on the evolution of complex traits. In this talk I will explain how the variation, selection, and evolution of FV traits can best be assessed using a single integrated theoretical and statistical framework, and how this framework can assess FV traits simply as phenotypes or, if genetic information is known, can decompose the phenotypic variance into genetic and environmental components using an explicitly quantitative genetic framework. Data on larval growth curves in flour beetles will be used to illustrate these points and to highlight statistical and empirical challenges that remain in the development of FV methods.

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