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.

D’Arcy Thompson and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

by Kevin N Laland

Last week I had the privilege of attending the workshop The Conceptual Legacy of “On Growth and Form” held in St Andrews UK, a (late) celebration of the centenary of publication of D’Arcy Thompson’s classic book (1917/1942).1 The meeting, organized by philosophers of biology Alan Love and Sahotra Sarkar, comprised an interesting mix of developmental

Is social transmission a forgotten force in coevolution?

by Rose Thorogood

During the last decade it has become impossible to ignore that social transmission of information occurs across the animal kingdom:1 humans and non-human animals alike learn by observing others. An explosion of studies demonstrate that species as diverse as Drosophila fruit flies to humpback whales either copy the behavior of others, or use it to

United fronts: Unity, organization, and syntheses in the life sciences

by Andrew Buskell

In his book Consilience, E.O. Wilson described science as he saw it: one moving ever closer to shared agreement on theories, principles, concepts, and standards of evidence. For Wilson, the indications that science was unifying were obvious; “disciplinary boundaries within the natural sciences are disappearing, to be replaced by shifting hybrid domains in which consilience

The variational ratchet: Intuiting the variational approach to niche construction

by Axel Constant & Karl J Friston

The principle of evolution by natural selection provides a solid conceptual tool to understand adaptive design. It operates like a ratchet, to retain and build upon functional variation. Pull down, ‘click’! Variation. Hold tight, lock it! Retention and differential fitness. Push up! Inheritance, and ratchet your way up towards peaks in the adaptive landscape. As

Pleiotropy allows the evolutionary maintenance of positive niche construction in the face of free-riders

by Mark M Tanaka

In our paper published recently in American Naturalist, we used mathematical models to help us understand how positive niche construction can be maintained. Many animals, plants and other organisms engage in niche construction, that is, they modify the environment and the subsequent selective pressures to which they are exposed. Positive niche construction occurs when organisms

What’s hiding in Waddington’s epigenetic landscape? A case study in baby cichlids

by Karina Vanadzina

In his 1957 book entitled The Strategy of the Genes, British scientist Conrad Hal Waddington noted that the genetic sequence does not map directly onto the phenotype we can observe in nature. Contrary to the gene-centric views held by many of his contemporaries, Waddington emphasised that phenotypes ultimately depend on the interaction between genes and