From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution

Abstract

Review of: From Embryology to Evo-Devo: A History of Developmental Evolution. Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007. 577 pp., illus. $55.00 (ISBN 9780262122832 cloth). From Embryology to Evo-Devo originated in a 2001 Dibner Institute workshop organized by the book's editors. Manfred D. Laubichler is an assistant professor of biology and an affiliated assistant professor of philosophy at Arizona State University; Jane Maienschein is Regents' Professor and Parents Association Professor at the same university, where she also directs the Center for Biology and Society. Both are long-time observers of, as well as participants in, the modern emergence of evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo-devo.” As they note in the introduction, we continue to confront “a rather old cluster of scientific problems of embryos, development and evolution,” and struggle with how to think about them and what to do about them in the lab. The quest to articulate how ontogeny and phylogeny fit together, and to achieve some kind of conceptual continuity that unifies their disparate timescales and explanatory modes, is a long-standing one. This volume, an anthology of essays, combines a history of these efforts with attempts to move the project forward.