Date:
Location:
Speaker:
Dr. Nathan Young
Assistant Professor, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, University of California San Francisco & Program Director, MA in Oral & Craniofacial Sciences, University of California San Francisco
Abstract:
How development structures genetic variation to generate a diversity of phenotypic outcomes is a question that is key not only for our understanding of the origins of human health and disease but also the timing and nature of important functional changes in our evolution. In this talk I focus on two examples relevant to human craniofacial evolution to show how: (1) developmental variation in signaling pathway activation helps to explain an integrated axis of continuous facial shape outcomes from normal to abnormal, and (2) a comparative developmental morphospace can be used as a predictive model for generating and testing hypotheses about the origins of variation and constraints in human facial evolution. Ultimately, I argue that decoding the “rules” of development is critical for bridging insights made from comparative genomics and personalized medicine to those from ancient DNA and the human fossil record.