The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought
Roots of Evo-Devo

Ron Amundson examines 200 years of scientific views on the evolution-development relationship from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology.

Ron Amundson (Author)

9780521703970, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 August 2007

296 pages
22.4 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.41 kg

'… as The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought demonstrates, understanding the deep epistemological and conceptual foundations of current research practices is clearly valuable. Amundson has taken an important first step, focusing largely on conceptual and ontological incompatibilities between scientific theories, thus suggesting some order among the ruins.' Science

In this book Ron Amundson examines two hundred years of scientific views on the evolution-development relationship from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). This perspective challenges several popular views about the history of evolutionary thought by claiming that many earlier authors had made history come out right for the Evolutionary Synthesis. The book starts with a revised history of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. It then investigates how development became irrelevant with the Evolutionary Synthesis. It concludes with an examination of the contrasts that persist between mainstream evolutionary theory and evo-devo. This book will appeal to students and professionals in the philosophy and history of science, and biology.

1. Introduction
Part I. Darwin's Century: Beyond the Essentialism Story: 2. Systematics and the birth of the natural system
3. The origins of morphology, the science of form
4. Owen and Darwin, the archetype and the ancestor
5. Evolutionary morphology: the first generation of evolutionists
6. Interlude
Part II. Neo-Darwin's Century: Explaining the Absence and the Reappearance of Development in Evolutionary Thought: 7. The invention of heredity
8. Basics of the evolutionary synthesis
9. Structuralist reactions to the synthesis
10. The synthesis matures
11. Recent debates and the continuing tension.

Subject Areas: Cellular biology [cytology PSF], Evolution [PSAJ], Philosophy of science [PDA]