Summary
A central goal of biology is to understand how and why diverse structures evolve. This highlights a long-standing question: do new forms arise mainly because natural selection directly favors them, or because they emerge indirectly as a consequence of how organisms grow and develop? Tackling these questions requires knowledge of how new forms originate and their fitness implications. This project uses ferns, an ecologically important and evolutionarily persistent group of plants, to address this fundamental problem by exploring the evolution of vascular architecture (the set of tubes that move
