Evo-Devo Path as a Bridge between Evolution, Morphological Disparity, and Medicine with Comments on “Hopeful Monsters” in the Age of Genomics

Abstract

Since its inception in the late 1970s/early 1980s, Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo) has produced much insight into the evolution of organismal design. Despite the obvious roots connecting Evo-Devo studies to pathology, malformations have been ignored as possible adaptive phenotypes within a different ecological or phylogenetic context and may provide insight into studies of macroevolution. While early opponents of the Modern Synthesis such as Richard Goldschmidt rooted for “hopeful monsters,” this idea was poorly supported and until recently has gone without many examples. Evo-Devo Path [1, 2] builds upon the theoretical framework of early biologists like Pere Alberch while also bridging our current understanding of genomics and development with the hierarchical organization of pathologies established by Isidore Gregory Saint-Hilaire and morphological disparity, thus further challenging the Modern Synthesis and interrupting the boundary between disease and novelty and serving as a bridge between the fields of biomedical research and natural history. Mutations in the regulation and expression of genes within our genome recur as categorizable malformations through the perturbation of key signaling pathways. With the advent of Evo-Devo and genomic advancements over the last few decades, we are able to revisit the micro-evolutionary-centered Modern Synthesis and the idea of “hopeful monsters” to find that unlike the contentious aura which surrounded Goldschmidt’s work, we may now be in a position to re-examine his theoretical framework along with the tenets of the modern synthesis.