2025/05/09 by Cassandra Zie Yang · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #Evolution and Science Education #Origins and Evolution of Life #Philosophy and History of Science
paper · doi:10.1093/biosci/biaf006
Many have contended that the last significant theoretical unification in evolutionary biology—the Modern Synthesis—left development out of the picture. Evolution Evolving attempts to salvage that. Opening up the black box, authors Lala and colleagues situate development at the center of evolutionary explanations and offers not only a comprehensive overview but also a timely integration. They draw on a variety of developmentally informed perspectives, including evo-devo, eco-evo-devo, developmental systems theory, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Moreover, they point to the organicist movement in the twentieth century as a historical counterpart, both with respect to their development-centered view and their situation in contrast to the mainstream discipline. The developmental perspective, the authors suggest, has always existed in parallel to the population perspective of the modern synthesis paradigm. Instead of rejecting the population perspective in favor of a developmental one, however, they attempt to reconcile them. There has been an almost banal way of doing this—namely, to acknowledge that the structure of a developmental system itself evolves. Such acknowledgement maintains the unidirectional causality between evolution and development. Development, seen as a set of phenomena shaped by evolutionary processes but with no evolutionary effects of its own, is rendered noncausal and epiphenomenal. Another approach reconciling evolution and development does credit the latter with a causal role. The causal role, however, is often a constraining one. The developmental process is seen as impeding the action of natural selection, making certain phenotypic variations evolutionarily improbable.