"The study, which was conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, showed that genes involved in creating different sexes, life stages and castes of fire ants and honeybees evolved more rapidly than genes not involved in these developmental processes. The researchers also found that these fast-evolving genes exhibited elevated rates of evolution even before they were recruited to produce diverse forms of an organism." Relaxed selection is a precursor to the evolution of phenotypic plasticity,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, Volume 108, Number 38, p.15936-15941, (2011)
[1]