Hall, Brian K. Evolutionary developmental biology . Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
URL1
Links between development and evolution have been sought for so long that in introducing the first edition of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, I discussed the difficulty of choosing a title relating development to evolution that had not al-ready been used. In my final choice, I sought to reflect the major themes of the book, which are how developmental processes effect evolutionary change and how development itself has evolved. I also sought to emphasize how tightly interwoven the two fields are and to draw attention to a distinct, emerging sub-discipline within biology. For evolutionary developmental biology (EDB or ‘evo-devo’) is not merely a fusion of the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology, the grafting of a developmental perspective onto evolutionary biology, or the incorporation of an evolutionary perspective into developmental biology. EDB strives to forge a unification of genomic, developmental, organismal, population and natural selection approaches to evolutionary change. It draws from develop-ment, evolution, palaeontology, molecular and systematic biology, but has its own set of questions, approaches and methods. Evolutionary developmental biology is now firmly established, as several lines of evidence attest. This edition is more than twice the size of the first; its 2200 references (more than double the number in the first edition), reflect the enormous amount of activity in the field. Symposia, conferences and TV programs have been devoted entirely to EDB. Advertisements for academic positions target evolution-ary developmental biologists. There are books about subsections of EDB such as the origin of body plans (Raff, 1996; Arthur, 1997). The journal Science devoted a six-page special news report to EDB in its issue of 4 July, 1997 (Science, 277, 34-9) and the 1996 McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology (the annual supple-ment to the McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology), has an entry on the topic (Hall, 1996a), while the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, in cooperation with the North American Space Agency (NASA) has targeted its 1998 summer research fellowships proposals in the area of EDB. Clearly, EDB has arrived.