Announcement of a new evo-devo book, Evolution Evolving

Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity

Kevin H. Lala, Tobias Uller, Nathalie Feiner, Marcus W. Feldman and Scott F. Gilbert

Princeton University Press, 2024. evolutionevolving.org.

Some of you may have been so fortunate as to receive gift cards for Amazon.com or local bookstores in your Christmas stockings. While I wouldn’t think of dissuading you from purchasing the latest Louise Perry mystery or the memoirs of pre-eminent singers and chefs, I would recommend that you consider a new intellectual thriller, Evolution Evolving.

Imagine if two outstanding evolutionary biologists realized that evolutionary theory cannot explain adaptation and biodiversity without incorporating developmental biology. Imagine them inviting three developmental biologists to work on a book with them to construct the foundations of a more complete evolutionary theory. This book will become Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity, a volume co-authored by evolutionary biologists Kevin Lala and Marcus Feldman, together with evolutionary developmental biologists Tobias Uller, Nathalie Feiner, and me.

 This is not a textbook. It is a symposium, a working out of ideas, such that the reader is in dialogue with the book. The book presents evidence for certain views — that plasticity is universal and fundamental for evolution; that organisms are multigenomic holobionts whose symbionts can create new phenotypes and reproductive isolation in the animals they co-create; that there are multiple pathways of inheritance, including symbionts, epialleles, culture, and parental effects, and that some of these modes of inheritance allow the transmission of environmentally induced traits. Most of us had trained to see evolution as changes in gene frequency and development as changes in gene expression. This book organizes evidence that these genocentric explanatory mechanisms are inadequate to explain adaptations or the diversity of life.

Reading the book should make one question and refine one’s own ideas, to question one’s assumptions. Yes, these developmental phenomena happen; but are these differences important enough to change the way you think about evolution, organisms, development, and science? This book presents evidence that these phenomena — developmental plasticity, developmental symbiosis,  and epigenetic inheritance systems — are critically important and that evolutionary biology gains enormous explanatory power only if it fully incorporates them. Some people have agreed with us. Marc Kirschner has called the book “a tour de force,” and Jessica Riskin has nominated the volume as a Scholarly Book of the Year, calling it “exhilarating reading. It is not just a book but an intellectual revolution.” Some people have disagreed.  Evolutionary biologist David Houle doesn’t think these phenomena are important enough to change the way we think about evolution; moreover, “they are difficult to study.” 

Twenty-five years ago, I predicted that evo-devo would cease to exist because it would become part of normative evolutionary biology. This is now happening. Look at the recent articles in PNAS about the genes responsible for the cryptic and mimetic pigmentation of insect wings. They are not classified under “developmental biology,” or even as “evolutionary developmental biology.” Rather, they are listed as “evolution.” Similarly, an evo-devo paper on the rates of prehistoric human teeth and brain development is listed in the “evolution” category, not as “development.” It seems that evolutionary developmental biology is becoming part of evolutionary biology. This book shows the many ways in which these fields can be merged.

Evolution is undergoing a metamorphosis, retaining some features, while jettisoning and repurposing others. It is evolution, but not as we knew it. It is an evolution where proximate and ultimate causes co-mingle, and where developmental mechanisms can bias the directions of evolutionary change. It is an evolutionary biology where the environment not only selects the phenotype but helps construct it.  Evolution Evolving is an evolutionary biology book where developmental mechanisms are major players in the evolutionary processes that create adaptations and biodiversity.   

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