Approximately two decades after the first pioneering analyses, the study of shape asymmetry
with the methods of geometric morphometrics has matured and is a burgeoning field. New …

Although recent genome-wide studies have provided valuable insights into the genetic basis
of human disease, they have explained relatively little of the heritability of most complex …

Fluctuating asymmetry consists of random deviations from perfect symmetry in populations
of organisms. It is a measure of developmental noise, which reflects a population's average …

Robustness is the invariance of phenotypes in the face of perturbation. The robustness of
phenotypes appears at various levels of biological organization, including gene expression …

There is increasing awareness that epistasis or gene-gene interaction plays a role in
susceptibility to common human diseases. In this paper, we formulate a working hypothesis …

Over the past 15 years, more than 2,000 quantitative trait loci (QTLs) have been identified in
crosses between inbred strains of mice and rats, but less than 1% have been characterized …

▪ Abstract Variation in the subtle differences between right and left sides of bilateral
characters, or fluctuating asymmetry (FA), has long been considered to be primarily …

Developmental systems integrate inputs of variation from different origins into the
observable variation of the resulting phenotype. Different components of phenotypic …

Morphological integration and modularity are closely related concepts about how different
traits of an organism are correlated. Integration is the overall pattern of intercorrelation; …

Fluctuating asymmetry, the random deviation from perfect symmetry, is a widely used
population-level index of developmental instability, developmental noise, and robustness. It …