In an article published in PNAS in 1998. Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart identified four properties of conserved cellular and developmental processes - versatile proteins, weak regulatory linkage, exploratory mechanisms, and genomic and spatial compartmentation - which, they argue, make these...
Evo-devo
Revisiting Sommer & Sternberg 1994
In a paper published in Science in 1994, Ralf Sommer and Paul Sternberg provided evidence to suggest that the evolution of organ position in organisms involves changes in the induction and competence of cells. At the time, it was already known that vulva formation in Caenorhabditis elegans happens...
Revisiting Gilbert 2001
In a paper published in Developmental Biology in 2001, Scott Gilbert laid out a vision for the reintegration of developmental biology and ecology. While in its early days, developmental biology paid great attention to the environmental context, in the twentieth century the focus of the discipline...
Revisiting Müller 2007
Evolutionary Developmental Biology (evo-devo for short) was established as a formal discipline in the early 80s and from soon after started making its presence felt in diverse areas of biological research. In 2007, roughly 25 years after the field’s establishment, Gerd Müller contributed an...
Revisiting Laland et al. 2015
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2015, Kevin Lala, Tobias Uller, Marcus Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka and John Odling-Smee laid out their vision for an "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" (EES), a new framework for Evolution that took...