The inhibitory cascade model and evolution in segmentally organized tissues

Abstract The inhibitory cascade model (ICM) of morphogenesis is an effort to link development to the production of variation, which can influence evolutionary trajectories. The ICM proposes that serially developing features, such as molar teeth, are governed by the relative magnitudes of one activating and one inhibiting developmental process. The statistical expectations of the ICM are typically expressed and analyzed on a first-element standardized scale and seem to be a good predictor of molar proportions. However, the ICM has been applied to traits that occur in series but do not develop in sequence and still recovers as good a fit as when applied to serially developing traits. Such an undiscriminating result raises questions about whether the fit of the ICM is an artifact of standardization. The mathematical rendition of the ICM does not correspond with the verbal descriptions of the developmental argument. Applying our novel re-articulation of the ICM to biological, non-biological, and simulated data, we demonstrate that the apparent goodness of fit of the ICM to many biological systems is an artifact of scaling correlated values with a common denominator. There is no evidence supporting the ICM at the developmental, variational, or evolutionary levels.