Conserved wing shape variation across biological scales unveils dialectical relationships between micro- and macroevolution

Abstract

Variation enables short-term evolution (microevolution), but its role in long-term evolution (macroevolution) is debated. Here, we analyzed a dataset of Drosophila wing variation across six levels of biological organization to demonstrate that microevolutionary variation and macroevolutionary divergence are positively correlated at all levels from variation within an individual to macroevolution over 40 million years. Surprisingly, the strongest relationship was between developmental noise and macroevolutionary divergence-which are traditionally considered the most distant- while the relationship between standing genetic variation and population divergence was modest, despite established theoretical predictions and empirical evidence. Our results indicate that the congruence of the developmental system with the long-term history of fluctuations in adaptive peaks creates dialectical relationships between microevolution and macroevolution.