A team of evolutionary biologists and theoreticians, including KLI Group Leader for Philosophy Cristina Villegas, and KLI External Faculty members Benedikt Hallgrímsson and Laura Nuño de la Rosa, and led by Christophe Pélabon, has recently published a review article on the notion of evolvability in the journal BioScience. This review article intends to bring the notion of evolvability closer to biologists of all disciplines by summarizing the main progresses made in evolvability research since its emergence in the 1990s, as well as by pointing towards the most salient open lines of evolutionary research that touch upon it.

Evolvability, conceptualised as the capacity of biological systems to produce viable variation, is a central notion in evolutionary biology. Organismal traits vary widely in the type and amount of variation they can generate, influencing the phenotypic dimensions and the pace at which they can evolve. Still, a number of difficulties stand in the way of integrating evolvability into mainstream evolutionary thinking, such as the term’s relatively recent origin and the lack of a unified definition across the many evolutionary disciplines that address it.

With this review article, the authors intend to bring the notion closer to biologists of all disciplines by summarizing the main progresses made in evolvability research since its emergence in the 1990s, as well as by pointing towards the most salient open lines of evolutionary research that touch upon it, and the possible challenges in that path.

Progress in the field of evolvability discussed in this review include its conceptualization as a disposition; the recognition of developmental mechanisms as responsible for differences in evolvability; the realization that (moderately) modular systems are more evolvable; the operationalization of short-term evolvability within the field of quantitative genetics. The review also points to future lines of research to investigate how do the determinants of evolvability itself evolve? How are the molecular and mutational levels related to phenotypic evolvability? How do plasticity and robustness relate to evolvability? Do differences in evolvability explain macroevolutionary patterns?

Publication: Pélabon, C., Agudelo-Cantero, G. A., Araya Ajoy, Y. G., Bolstad, G. H., Cheng, C., Galis, F., ... & Wright, J. (2025). Evolvability: progress and key questions. BioScience, biaf111.