Evolution and development of sexual dimorphism across horned beetle traits and species
Hello! I'm Erica Nadolski.
Thanks for stopping by.
I am fascinated by the biodiversity apparent all around us, and the ways in which we conceptualize it and try to understand it. As an empirical scientist, I am interested in how developmental processes bias heritable phenotypic variation, influence responses to selection, and shape phenotypic evolution. I use insects as models to study how developmental plasticity in particular and developmental bias broadly may affect genetic and epigenetic inheritance and contribute to biodiversity, and to study how diverse genetic and environmental cues during development - such as sex and nutrition - are transduced by developing systems to enable highly similar genomes to generate diverse adaptive phenotypes. In parallel, my interests in the philosophy of biology have led me to explore how we conceptualize the things that we study as biologists - such as a trait, a unit of selection, an organism, an evolutionary novelty, etc., how these conceptions shape the questions that we ask and the range of answers that we can arrive at, and how critical examination of these conceptions can lead us to new modes or realms of inquiry.
Research
Publications & CV
Promises and limits of an agency perspective in evolutionary developmental biology
Ever wondered what a modern organism-centered biology might look like? Or how this perspective might change how we study evolution and development?
