Research
My research focuses on the relationship between evolution and development, as captured in the following two complementary questions:
- How did diverse developmental strategies originate during the course of evolution?
- How do developmental mechanisms, once evolved, shape evolutionary diversification?
To make progress on these questions, we critically need theoretical approaches that can bridge evolution and development. To this end, I develop mathematical models that incorporate recent empirical insights into evolution and development, and employ them to generate new insights into how evolution shaped development and vice versa.
Theme 1: Emergence of development at the origins of multicellularity
Multicellular development – the process by which multicellular organization arises, typically starting from just a single cell – is a miracle of self-organization. Multicellular development is also a product of evolution. However, we know very little about how multicellular development originated in evolution. I use models to attempt to understand how principles of multicellular development could have emerged at or around the origins of multicellularity. In doing so, I take advantage of recent empirical insights that have revolutionized our understanding of the first multicellular organisms and their unicellular ancestors, including that many of these ancestors were not as simple as previously assumed but rather are equipped with much of the genetic toolkit required for complex multicellularity.
→ Staps et al 2019 on emergence of life cycles at the origin of multicellularity
Theme 2: Developmental strategies to cope with environmental variability
No organism faces a completely stable environment. As a result, developmental strategies have evolved that allow flexible responses to changing conditions. I focus on the evolution of flexibility in collectives, which includes multicellular organisms (collectives of cells) but also colony-forming social insects (collectives of workers). Such collectives exhibit substantial variation in whether and how they flexibly regulate their activity in response to their surroundings. I investigate this variation from the perspective of the system’s ecology: how do the environmental pressures that a collective faces shape its flexibility and its internal organization?
→ Staps & Tarnita 2022 on evolution of flexibility in task allocation
→ Staps et al 2024 on evolution of communication in social insects
Theme 3: Evo-devo of color patterns
The developmental processes underlying collective organization are a product of evolution, but development may in turn also influence the course of evolution. After all, what types of (changes in) collective organization can arise over evolutionary time depends on what is developmentally feasible. As a model system to investigate the role of development in shaping evolution, I use vertebrate color patterns, which have the advantage that they are easily accessible, spectacularly diverse, and increasingly developmentally understood. I perform this work by taking an integrative approach that combines surveys of museum specimens, phylogenetic analyses, and developmentally-informed mathematical models.
→ Staps et al 2023 on the evolutionary diversification of rodent stripe patterns