Morphometrics

Abstract

It is human nature to measure things, and this holds true for science as well as everyday life. The five papers in this book demonstrate the usefulness of a morphometric approach to a variety of subjects in natural history, including systematics, phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental variation, and ontogenetic adaptation. As our understanding of genetic control mechanisms and epigenetics has matured over the last several decades, it has become clear that morphometric assessment continues to be important to our overall understanding of natural variability in growth and form. The tremendous growth of our knowledge base during the last century has necessitated that we find new ways to measure and track greater detail as well as greater numbers of parameters among populations and individuals.