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Some recent insights from cell and developmental biology (1) are of special interest to evolutionary biologists. Here, I highlight a few of them, which are selected for reasons best understood by beginning with a short history of current ideas. Some of the oldest controversies in evolutionary biology stem from disagreement over the origins of adaptive design. Should design be attributed to selection, as Darwin (2) argued, or to development as maintained by Bateson (3)? Gradualism played a crucial role in Darwin’s argument because it showed the power of selection to mold complex traits from small variations. The large variants sometimes produced by development, on the other hand, invite explanation of adaptive form in terms of accident or divine creation. Darwin was uncompromising on this point and cleverly explained developmentally mediated heterochrony as involving complex traits first established by gradual change in ancestral juveniles or adults (2, p. 138). The Darwinian theory of natural selection, firmly wed to gradualism, was reinforced and promoted by the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (sometimes called the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis), which emphasized the importance of small genetically mediated variations for evolutionary change within populations. A side effect of the synthesis was a further downplaying of development, in part because it continued to be identified with saltation and antiselection arguments, e.g., in the work of Goldschmidt (4) and others (see refs. 5 and 6 for more thorough discussions), and because attention focused strongly and profitably on the genetic causes of variation (7). In genetic experiments, variability that was associated with flexibility and condition-sensitive development came to be regarded as noise, a factor to be controlled and not studied for its own sake. Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in phenotypic plasticity and development in relation to evolution and a feeling that a Second Evolutionary Synthesis is in …

Evolution in the light of developmental and cell biology, and vice versa