Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offers both an account of developmental processes and also new integrative frameworks for analyzing interactions between development and evolution. Biologists and philosophers are keen on evo-devo in part because it appears to offer a comfort zone between, on the one hand, what some take to be the relative inability of mainstream evolutionary biology to integrate a developmental perspective; and, on the other hand, what some take to be more intractable syntheses of development and evolution. In this (...) article, I outline core concerns of evo-devo, distinguish theoretical and practical variants, and counter Sterelny's recent argument that evo-devo's attention to development, while important, offers no significant challenge to evolutionary theory as we know it. (shrink)

In this paper I develop three conceptions of the relationship between evolutionary and developmental biology. I further argue that: (a) the choice between them largely turns on as yet unresolved empirical considerations; (b) none of these conceptions demand a fundamental conceptual reevaluation of evolutionary biology; and (c) while developmental systems theorists have constructed an important and innovative alternative to the standard view of the genotype/phenotype relations, in considering the general issue of the relationship between evolutionary and developmental biology, we can (...) remain neutral on this debate. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the development of evolutionary theory in the period from 1918 to 1932. It argues that: (i) Fisher's work in 1918 constituted a not fully satisfactory reduction of biometry to Mendelism; (ii) there was a synthesis in the 1920s but that this synthesis was mainly one of classical genetics with population genetics, with Haldane's The Causes of Evolution being its founding document; (iii) the most important achievement of the models of theoretical population genetics was to show that natural (...) selection sufficed as a mechanism for evolution; and (iv) Haldane formulated a prospective evolutionary theory in the 1920s whereas Fisher and Wright formulated retrospective theories of evolutionary history. (shrink)

Many scientists and philosophers of science are troubled by the relative isolation of developmental from evolutionary biology. Reconciling the science of development with the science of heredity preoccupied a minority of biologists for much of the twentieth century, but these efforts were not corporately successful. Mainly in the past fifteen years, however, these previously dispersed integrating programmes have been themselves synthesized and so reinvigorated. Two of these more recent synthesizing endeavours are evolutionary developmental biology and developmental systems theory. While the (...) former is a bourgeoning and scientifically well-respected biological discipline, the same cannot be said of DST, which is virtually unknown among biologists. In this review, we provide overviews of DST and EDB, summarize their key tenets, examine how they relate to one another and to the study of epigenetics, and survey the impact that DST and EDB have had on biological theory and practice. (shrink)