Integration, Disintegration, and Self-Similarity: Characterizing the Scales of Shape Variation in Landmark Data

The biologist examining samples of multicellular organisms in anatomical detail must already have an intuitive concept of morphological integration. But quantifying that intuition has always been fraught with difficulties and paradoxes, especially for the anatomically labelled Cartesian coordinate data that drive today’s toolkits of geometric morphometrics. Covariance analyses of interpoint distances, such as the Olson–Miller factor approach of the 1950’s, cannot validly be extended to handle the spatial structure of complete morphometric descriptions; neither can analyses of shape coordinates that ignore the mean form. This paper introduces a formal parametric quantification of integration by analogy with how time series are approached in modern paleobiology. Over there, a finding of trend falls under one tail of a distribution for which stasis comprises the other tail. The null hypothesis separating these two classes of finding is the random walks, which are self-similar, meaning that they show no interpretable structure at any temporal scale. Trend and stasis are the two contrasting ways of deviating from this null. The present manuscript introduces an analogous maneuver for the spatial aspects of ontogenetic or phylogenetic organismal studies: a subspace within the space of shape covariance structures for which the standard isotropic (Procrustes) model lies at one extreme of a characteristic parameter and the strongest growth-gradient models at the other. In-between lies the suggested new construct, the spatially self-similar processes that can be generated within the standard morphometric toolkit by a startlingly simple algebraic manipulation of partial warp scores. In this view, integration and “disintegration” as in the Procrustes model are two modes of organismal variation according to which morphometric data can deviate from this common null, which, as in the temporal domain, is formally featureless, incapable of supporting any summary beyond a single parameter for amplitude. In practice the classification can proceed by examining the regression coefficient for log partial warp variance against log bending energy in the standard thin-plate spline setup. The self-similarity model, for which the regression slope is precisely [Formula: see text] corresponds well to the background against which the evolutionist’s or systematist’s a-priori notion of “local shape features” can be delineated. Integration as detected by the regression slope can be visualized by the first relative intrinsic warp (first relative eigenvector of the nonaffine part of a shape coordinate configuration with respect to bending energy) and may be summarized by the corresponding quadratic growth gradient. The paper begins with a seemingly innocent toy example, uncovers an unexpected invariance as an example of the general manipulation proposed, then applies the new modeling tactic to three data sets from the existing morphometric literature. Conclusions follow regarding findings and methodology alike.