A new paper in Evolution, THE LOCUS OF EVOLUTION: EVO DEVO AND THE GENETICS OF ADAPTATION.
An important tenet of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo devo”) is that adaptive mutations affecting morphology are more likely to occur in the cis-regulatory regions than in the protein-coding regions of genes…Neither the theoretical arguments nor the data from nature, then, support the claim for a predominance of cis-regulatory mutations in evolution. Although this claim may be true, it is at best premature. Adaptation and speciation probably proceed through a combination of cis-regulatory and structural mutations, with a substantial contribution of the latter.
One of the coauthors, Jerry Coyne, has taken aim at evo devo before.
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