Hormones, developmental plasticity, and adaptive evolution: Endocrine flexibility as a catalyst for ‘plasticity-first’ phenotypic divergence

Explaining how populations adapt to environments is among the foremost objectives of evolutionary theory. Over generations, natural selection impels the phenotypic distribution of a population based on individual variation in phenotype and fitness. However, environmental conditions can also shape how individuals develop within their lifetime to influence which phenotypes are expressed in a population. It has been proposed that such...