ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin’s legacy looms even more brightly due to the work of Herbert and Irene Baker. While the power of natural selection is celebrated in the work of all three, they are also keenly aware of phylogenetic, structural and other constraints within which natural selection operates in nature. Theirs is a rich view of life. The multifaceted place of breeding systems, with its myriad causes and consequences, is a theme that appears throughout the Bakers’ work. The chapter explores the potential for a developmental connection among rapid flowering, small flowers and autogamy in some herbaceous wildflowers. It considers the usefulness of developmental information in attempts to distinguish adaptive features from incidental consequences in an organism’s phenotype. The exploration is an alternative though not mutually exclusive hypothesis. Reduced flower size and associated shape changes in some inbreeders are hypothesized to be but one manifestation of a broader pattern of evolutionary juvenilization.
