Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo‐Devo‐Path), or Macroevolutionary Medicine: linking anatomy, evolution, development and human pathologies

Since the rise of Evo‐Devo in the 1980s few authors have attempted to combine the increasing knowledge obtained from the study of model organisms and human medicine with data from comparative and evolutionary biology in order to investigate the links between development, pathology and macroevolution. Fortunately, this situation is slowly changing, with a renewed interest in Evolutionary Developmental Pathology (Evo‐Devo‐Path) in the last decades. However, this interest and the new data obtained from it, as well as their main implications for evolution and medicine, have not been the object of a synthesis to the broader scientific community and wider public. In this talk I will thus provide such a synthesis. Specifically, I will provide a brief historical account on the study of the links between evolution, development and pathologies, followed by case studies from the recent work done by me and other colleagues on subjects related to Evo‐Devo‐Path, and then by a general discussion on the broader anatomical, developmental and macroevolutionary implications of these case studies and of research recently done by other authors. An important component is to therefore also contribute to the understanding of the links between the phenotype and the genotype, within both normal and abnormal development. Therefore I will also include the results of work I have been doing with physicians and surgeons who are interested in directly applying and/or collecting Evo‐Devo‐Path data to their own medical interventions, as part of an effort to focus on the applications and implications of these data for direct medical use. My primary aim is to highlight the strength of studying developmental anomalies within an evolutionary framework to understand morphological diversity and disease by connecting these recent works with the research done and broader ideas proposed by authors such as Étienne Geoffroy Saint‐Hilaire, Waddington, Goldschmidt, Gould and Per Alberch, among many others, to pave the way for further and much needed work regarding abnormal development and macroevolution. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .