New evo-devo textbook ‘Eco-Evo-Devo: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Evolution, and Health’

It is my pleasure to announce that a new evo-devo textbook will soon be available. It will even be more than evo-devo, as its name suggests: Eco-Evo-Devo: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Evolution, and Health. This book is a radical metamorphic molt of the Gilbert and Epel Ecological Developmental Biology.  It shows how developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and ecology each form the context for studying the others. My new co-author is David Pfennig, a card-carrying evolutionary ecologist whose expertise is the evolution of plasticity. The book contends that the field of evolution must include a developmental framework which integrates population genetics with alternative inheritance systems, symbiosis, and plasticity.

Both the format and the individual chapters have been updated. Indeed, there are eight new chapters in the book. The initial chapters are mostly new and are introductions to the principles of development, evolution, and ecology. These should allow each student, no matter in which discipline they were originally trained, to take part in subsequent discussions. Plasticity and symbiotic relations during development are highlighted in these chapters and especially in the new introductory chapter. If species are united vertically by evolution and horizontally by ecology, developmental biology provides a third axis permeating them both.

      The second portion of the book integrates these concepts to emphasize

            •the organism as an ecosystem (holobiont theory)

            • heredity as the transmission of genes, epigenetic patterns, cultures, and even particular environments

            • evolution through developmental regulatory genes and symbiosis

            • phenotypic plasticity and evolution

            • the origins of complexity.

 The third section of the book concerns the “downsides” of having such entangled systems of development: teratogenesis, endocrine disruptors, and the developmental origins of adult disease. The book ends with an assessment of what eco-evo-devo science can do to alleviate the biodiversity crisis.

 Over 50 years ago, Leigh van Valen wrote,  “A plausible argument could be made that evolution is the control of development by ecology.” This well-illustrated volume provides evidence for that argument.  We think that Eco-Evo-Devo will show undergraduate and graduate students how developmental biology helps form a new evolutionary framework for the origins and maintenance of biodiversity.

An overview, description, table of contents (and incredibly beautiful cover) can be seen at the Oxford University Press website. 

Scott F. Gilbert

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