 Waddington stated that genetic assimilation overcomes the barrier to selection imposed by what he called canalization of developmental pathways; he supposed that the organism's genetics evolved to ensure that development proceeded in a certain way regardless of normal environmental variations.The classic example of genetic assimilation was a pair of experiments in 1942 and 1953 by Waddington.He exposed "Drosophila" fruit fly embryos to ether, producing an extreme change in their phenotype