Synergistic Selection and the Self-Made Man

by Peter A Corning

Part I: ‘Synergistic Selection’: It could be called Holistic Darwinism The word “Synergy” is only vaguely familiar to many of us. Perhaps we associate it with corporate mergers, or drug interactions, or some other commonplace usage. In fact, synergy is a ubiquitous phenomenon. It is literally everywhere around us, and it represents one of

Ancestral plasticity paves the way for evolutionary novelty in spadefoot toads

by Nicholas A Levis

The question, “Where do new traits come from?” has long puzzled evolutionary biologists. New traits are often assumed to arise exclusively from genetic changes – including, but not limited to, mutations in regulatory sequences or gene bodies, inversions, and gene (or genome) duplications. Mary Jane West-Eberhard formalized a hypothesis in which the evolution of novelty

The unlikely but fruitful waltz of a curious couple: Phenotypic plasticity and learning theory

by Miguel Brun-Usan

When the Modern Synthesis was put together in the early decades of the twentieth century, natural selection became the obvious focus of evolutionary thought. Although this focus has increased our understanding of biological evolution by orders of magnitude, it tells us little about how phenotypic variation is produced. Variation – the third evolutionary pillar envisioned

Extended Heredity: An interview with Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day

by Russell Bonduriansky, Troy Day, Kevin N Laland & Katrina J Falkenberg

Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution is a fantastic new book by Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day about the role of nongenetic inheritance in evolution. There are many similarities between the views presented in the book and the extended evolutionary synthesis but there are also differences. Kevin Laland identified some of these

Developmental bias and evolution

by Tobias Uller

David Houle and his colleagues must have been tired of flies. By the time they finished, they had been photographing and measuring over 50,000 fly wings. The results revealed that mutations commonly produced particular wing shapes, whereas others were rare. Equally painstaking work has quantified variability of the nematode vulva, butterfly eyespots, and mammalian teeth.

Structural inheritance: The parent as a developmental template

by Katrina J Falkenberg & Russell Bonduriansky

Structural inheritance is an often-neglected form of nongenetic inheritance. In their new book, Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution, authors Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day describe numerous examples of structural inheritance, where structural features – and their mutilations – are inherited in subsequent generations through self-templating and related processes. Parental traits

Developmental bias: An interview with Wallace Arthur

by Wallace Arthur & Katrina J Falkenberg

Wallace Arthur is an Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the National University of Ireland in Galway. He is a renowned evolutionary developmental biologist, working across disciplinary boundaries to understand the evolution of animal body plans and segmentation, a subject on which he has published numerous scientific papers and books, as well as popular science pieces.