A development-centric perspective on pace-of-life syndromes

Organism responses to environmental change require coordinated changes across correlated traits, so-called syndromes. For example, animals differ in their "pace-of-life syndrome" (POLS); suites of correlated life-history, behavioral and physiological traits. But standard "gene-centric" evolutionary theory cannot explain why POLSs exist because it assumes that the expression of phenotypic traits of animals is determined by genotype-specified reaction norms; it ignores that developmental processes can bias the direction of evolution so that phenotypes no longer match genotype-by-environment interactions. Here we apply a development-centric perspective to derive new POLS hypotheses that can resolve the conflict that current POLS predictions fail to explain which species/populations are resilient to environmental change.