Abstract
Evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo) is a new and rapidly developing field of biology which focuses on questions in the intersection of evolution and development and has been seen by many as a potential synthesis of these two fields. This synthesis is the topic of the books reviewed here. Integrating Evolution and Development (edited by Roger Sansom and Robert Brandon), is a collection of papers on conceptual issues in Evo-Devo, while From Embryology to Evo-Devo (edited by Manfred Laubichler and Jane Maienschein) is a history of the problem of the relations between ontogeny and phylogeny.
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Notes
This attitude has survived until recently among evolutionary biologists: “problems concerned with the orderly development of the individual are unrelated to those of the evolution of organisms through time” (Wallace 1986).
Although concepts such as genetic drift and developmental constraints have become part and parcel of evolutionary biological research, this does not change this general characterization of neo-Darwinism.
The authors define a novelty as “a structure that is neither homologous to any structure in the ancestral species nor homonomous to any other structure of the same organism” (p. 50).
I borrow the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic explanations, which the discussion of the present authors implies, from Godfrey-Smith (1996).
There are, however, a few cases where OSA and neo-Darwinism offer different explanations, as in the case of polymorphisms or the explanation of the Cambrian explosion mentioned above.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Samir Okasha for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review.
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Ioannidis, S. How development changes evolution: conceptual and historical issues in evolutionary developmental biology. Biol Philos 23, 567–578 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-008-9111-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-008-9111-4