Preface. Between Ernst Haeckel and the homeobox: the role of developmental biology in explaining evolution

Abstract

The importance of embryonic development for evolutionary biology has been an issue ever since Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, however, Modern Synthesis approaches to evolution have often neglected certain aspects of developmental biology or treated development as a black box (Mayr and Provine 1980; Breidbach and Ghiselin 2007a, b). Although Wallace’s statement that ‘‘problems concerned with the orderly development of the individual are unrelated to those of the evolution of organisms through time’’ (Wallace 1986, p. 149) is extreme, midtwentieth century mainstream evolutionary biology did not feel much need for an integration of developmental biology into its theoretical foundations. The fact that evolutionary questions have been of interest to some developmental biologists between the era of Darwin and Haeckel and the 1980s, i.e., that modern evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo-devo, as the field is often called by its practitioners, in fact has a history, has received relatively little attention. It has even been claimed that ‘‘Following a quiescent period of almost a century, present-day Evo-devo erupted out of the discovery of the homeobox on the 1980s’’ (Arthur 2002, p. 757). Thus, there is a need for more research into the period ‘‘between Ernst Haeckel and the homeobox’’ in order to gain a more complete understanding of the roots of modern Evo-devo. We are helped by the recent upsurge in interest in the history of Evodevo, which has produced several edited volumes (e.g., Laubichler and Maienschein 2007) and thematic issues of journals. Also this journal has contributed to this increased publication activity on the pre-history and history of Evodevo, having had thematic issues (Theory in Biosciences 124:259–420; 126:115–175) on different aspects of the subject. The history of Evo-devo in the Anglo-American world has received renewed attention recently, as exemplified, e.g., by the work of Alan Love (e.g., Love 2003, 2006; Love and Raff 2003), whose scheme of the historical development of the relationship between evolution and development is here reproduced as Fig. 1. We have ourselves concentrated on the history of Evo-devo in the Germanand Russian-speaking countries (e.g., Hossfeld and Olsson 2003; Levit et al. 2004, 2006; Olsson et al. 2006; Breidbach and Ghiselin 2007a, b; Reis et al. 2007). In Love’s scheme (Fig. 1), he contrasts the ‘‘textbook version’’ (left) with an improved, updated version (right). In the left diagram, evolutionary biology is split from developmental biology, which was dominated by ‘‘Entwickelungsmechanik’’ (Developmental Mechanics) in the first third of the twentieth century. The developmental biologist Thomas H. Morgan (1866–1945) is seen as an example of the split between experimental embryology and genetics, which he helped to found and develop into molecular genetics. Another part of genetics, population genetics, became an important part of the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology (Mayr and Provine 1980; L. Olsson (&) Institut fur Spezielle Zoologie und Evolutionsbiologie mit Phyletischem Museum, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Erbertstr, 1, 07743 Jena, Germany e-mail: Lennart.Olsson@uni-jena.de