In a broader sense variational properties include phenotypic plasticity.
While the functional properties of an organism determine is level of adaptedness to its environment, it is the variational properties of the organisms in a species that chiefly determine its evolvability and genetic robustness.
Variational properties group together many classical and more recent concepts of evolutionary biology.
It includes the classical concepts of pleiotropy, canalization, developmental constraints, developmental bias, morphological integration, developmental homeostasis and later concepts such as robustness, neutral networks, modularity, the G-matrix and distribution of fitness effects.
While the genome is typically thought of as the storehouse of information that generates the organism, it can also be seen as the set of heritable degrees of freedom for varying the organism.