Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Transcending the Emergence/Reduction Distinction: The Case of Biology
- Other Histories, Other Biologies
- The Ontogenesis of Human Identity
- Souls, Minds, Bodies and Planets
- Evo-devo: A New Evolutionary Paradigm
- Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits?
- Evolution and Aesthetics
- The Problems of Biological Design
- Are there Genes?
- Folk Psychology and the Biological Basis of Intersubjectivity
- The Loss of Rational Design
- Under Darwin's Cosh? Neo-Aristotelian Thinking in Environmental Ethics
- The Cultural Origins of Cognitive Adaptations
- Name Index
Evo-devo: A New Evolutionary Paradigm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- Transcending the Emergence/Reduction Distinction: The Case of Biology
- Other Histories, Other Biologies
- The Ontogenesis of Human Identity
- Souls, Minds, Bodies and Planets
- Evo-devo: A New Evolutionary Paradigm
- Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits?
- Evolution and Aesthetics
- The Problems of Biological Design
- Are there Genes?
- Folk Psychology and the Biological Basis of Intersubjectivity
- The Loss of Rational Design
- Under Darwin's Cosh? Neo-Aristotelian Thinking in Environmental Ethics
- The Cultural Origins of Cognitive Adaptations
- Name Index
Summary
The homologies of process within morphogenetic fields provide some of the best evidence for evolution—just as skeletal and organ homologies did earlier. Thus, the evidence for evolution is better than ever. The role of natural selection in evolution, however, is seen to play less an important role. It is merely a filter for unsuccessful morphologies generated by development. Population genetics is destined to change if it is not to become as irrelevant to evolution as Newtonian mechanics is to contemporary physics.
(Gilbert, Opitz, and Raff 1996, 368)These are exciting days for evolutionary biology. In the past twenty years or so, the molecular approach to biology—evolutionary development or more familiarly ‘evo-devo’—has swept all before it. Now we can trace development from the gene to the finished organism. Along the way, some magnificent discoveries have been made, most significantly that organisms as different as the fruitfly and the human share hugely important genes for development. We humans are put together in the same way as are those little insects that hang around compost heaps and rotting vegetables in garbage cans. This has led some enthusiasts to think that we are on the verge of—certainly in need of—a whole new theory of evolution. A new paradigm, that rejects Darwinian natural selection, or that at least reduces it to an unimportant role in cleaning up after the real work has been done. Now we have or are after a new theory-perhaps one that makes the really creative work appear in the course of development.
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- Philosophy, Biology and Life , pp. 105 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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