Evo‐Devo and an Expanding Evolutionary Synthesis

Biologists have long sought to understand which genes and what kinds of changes in their sequences are responsible for the evolution of animal anatomy and morphological diversity. Advances in molecular and evolutionary developmental biology over the past thirty years have led to a general understanding that animal form evolves largely by altering the expression of functionally conserved proteins, and that such changes largely occur through mutations in the cis ‐regulatory sequences of pleiotropic developmental regulatory loci and of the target genes within the vast networks they control.