A NEW SYNTHESIS FINALLY ARRIVING!

Abstract

Review of: Stern, D. L. 2011. Evolution, Development & the Predictable Genome. Roberts and Co. Publishers, Greenwood Village, CO. ISBN: 978193622101 1. $45.00 When developmental biology reached the level of maturity and the technical capabilities to return to questions of organic evolution, after nearly a century of separation from evolutionary questions, the event was greeted with much anticipation. In the air was the expectation of a new level of synthetic understanding of evolution. Sadly, though, the meeting between evolutionary and developmental biologists was not a meeting of like minds. To the evolutionary biologists, the arrival of developmental types in their territory felt more like an invasion by space aliens with their transgenic monstrosities and glowing embryos. What exactly do we learn from a transgenic mouse without a head and flies with four wings? And the developmental biologist who ventured out of his/her homeland of experimental biology to evolution felt like he or she is visiting some strange tribe that practices a form a mathematical Voodoo with counting flies and bristles. How do the equations of population genetics relate to the molecular reality of heredity? There was little that the two groups really understood about each other, leading to skeptical voices, like that of Ron Amundson (2005), who questioned whether the chasm between evolutionary and developmental biology will ever be bridged. This of course is a cartoon, and does not do justice to the amount of positive work done by many at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology. But nevertheless, at a deeper conceptual level, the rapprochement was and is still difficult. Is a new synthesis really necessary as, for instance, Massimo Pigliucci argues (2007), or is it perhaps even impossible, as Amundson suggests? It seems obvious that a true integration of developmental and evolutionary biology will have to come from scientists equally at home in population genetic theory as in the experimental culture of developmental biology. Unfortunately for our science, the number of people so trained is still small, but David Stern in certainly one of them. Stern was trained as an evolutionary behavioral ecologist but then got postdoctoral training as a developmental Drosophila geneticist. Hence it is a good idea to listen closely when Stern is summarizing his thinking about a developmental perspective on evolution. To cut a long story short, Stern's approach is based on two key insights. The first comes from population genetics and concerns the factors that determine the chance that a mu-