The Evolution of Genetic Architecture

Genetic architecture, the structure of the mapping from genotype to phenotype, determines the variational properties of the phenotype and is instrumental in understanding its evolutionary potential. Throughout most of the history of evolutionary biology, genetic architecture has been treated as a given set of parameters and not as a set of dynamic variables. The past decade has seen renewed interest in incorporating the genotype-phenotype map as a dynamical part of population genetics. This has been aided by several conceptual advances. I review these developments with emphasis on recent theoretical work on the evolution of genetic architecture and evolvability.