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Article

Facilitated variation: how evolution learns from past environments to generalize to new environments.

PLoS computational biology - 1 Nov 2008

Parter Merav, Kashtan Nadav, Alon Uri

Abstract excerpt

One of the striking features of evolution is the appearance of novel structures in organisms. Recently, Kirschner and Gerhart have integrated discoveries in evolution, genetics, and developmental biology to form a theory of facilitated variation (FV). The key observation is that organisms are designed such that random genetic changes are channeled in phenotypic directions that are potentially useful. An open...

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PMID: 18989390
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000206
PMCID: PMC2563028

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PubMed metadata and Literature Corpus relationships. Corpus snapshot updated 7 Sept 2026. Manifest publication-graph-cohort-2026-09-07.1.

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