evo-devo nonsense?
- Genomes vary significantly but the body plans do not of the Caenorhabditis family.
- The embryogenesis of four species of the Caenorhabditis family are similar.
- Patterns of cell migration, cell death and differentiation are nearly identical.
- Mechanism of establishment of left-right axis is conserved
during evolution.
the embryonic development of all four Caenorhabditis species are nearly identical, suggesting that an apparently optimal program to construct the body plan of nematodes has been conserved for at least 20 million years.
This contrasts the levels of divergence between the genomes and the protein orthologs of the Caenorhabditis species, which is comparable to the level of divergence between mouse and human.
This indicates an intricate relationship between the structure of genomes and the morphology of animals.
Definition of intricate by Merriam-Webster
1 : having many complexly interrelating parts or elements : complicated
2 : difficult to resolve or analyze
the general strategy to construct a nematodeevolved considerably during evolution.
substantial genomic differencesyet the four species are highly similar in external morphology and, as far as known, in their habitat and ecological requirements
this pattern would suggest an origin by allopatric, non-adaptive speciation.
would also agree with an adaptive species formation under at least partly sympatric conditions, driven by a yet-to-be-discovered subtle adaptive (ecological) differentiation.
it appears to be most astonishing that these organisms are apparently characterized by a high substitution rate (Cutter, 2008), genome reductions related to different reproductive modes (Fierst et al., 2015) and a low protein level genomic identity
