Conserved wing shape variation across biological scales

Variation is crucial for microevolution, but its role in macroevolution is debated. Recently, macroevolutionary divergence is suggested to correlate with variation within populations, but the mechanisms remain unknown. We analyzed a dataset that includes developmental noise, mutational variance, plasticity, genetic variance, population divergence, and species divergence in <i>Drosophila</i> wing to assess whether the variance–divergence correlation is conserved from variation within an individual to 40 million years of macroevolution.