Raissa L. Berg's contributions to the study of phenotypic integration, with a professional biographical sketch

Abstract

Raissa L. Berg had a remarkable career in many respects and an impact on the study of phenotypic integration that continues to increase over 50 years after the publication of her seminal paper in that area. She was born and lived most of her life in Russia, with most of her research focused on measuring spontaneous mutation rates in Drosophila . She was forced to abandon this work during the height of Lysenko's power in Russia, so she turned temporarily to the study of correlation patterns in plants; ironically, this work has had a more enduring impact than her main body of research. She showed that floral and vegetative traits become decoupled into separate correlation ‘pleiades’ in plants with specialized pollinators, but floral and vegetative traits remain correlated in plants that have less specialized pollination. Unfortunately, her plant work is often mis-cited as providing evidence for increased correlations among floral traits due to selection by pollinators for functional integration, a point she never made and one that is not supported by her data. Still, many studies of correlation pleiades have been conducted in plants, with the results mostly supporting Berg's hypothesis, although more studies on species with generalized pollination are needed.