Causes of Phenotypic Variation

This is the "common thread" I need to run through my PhD proposal. I want to base my PhD on the big question:

What causes organisms to vary in the patterns we see in nature?

Stated that way, it looks appropriately "big picture", so hopefully this will help me extract money from the Gnomes of Zurich. More on that once the proposal is out the door and the deadline of submission passes (May 31).

I'm sitting here, procrastinating, while I should be working on my presentation summarizing my proposal to FABlab tomorrow. The presentation is in progress, kinda, which means I have some slides, and some vague ideas, and those two things don't necessarily correlate. Blah.

Back to work....

Picture of a card from the game "Illuminai" by Steve Jackson Games Inc. I'm probably violating copyright or something, so I'll provide a link to the page for that game.