Where is, in 2017, the evo in evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology)?

Plant morpho evo-devo

Evo-devo is often thought of as being the study of which genes underlie which phenotypes. However, evo-devo is much more than this, especially in plant science. In leaf scars along stems, cell changes across wood growth rings, or flowers along inflorescences, plants trace a record of their own development. Plant morpho evo-devo provides data that genes could never furnish on themes such as heterochrony, the evolution of temporal phenotypes, modularity, and phenotype-first evolution. As plant science surges into increasingly -omic realms, it is essential to keep plant morpho evo-devo in full view as an honored member of the evo-devo canon, ensuring that plant scientists can, wherever they are, generate fundamental insights at the appropriate level of biological organization.

Scale-Free Biology: Integrating Evolutionary and Developmental Thinking

When the history of life on earth is viewed as a history of cell division, all of life becomes a single cell lineage. The growth and differentiation of this lineage in reciprocal interaction with its environment can be viewed as a developmental process; hence the evolution of life on earth can also be seen as the development of life on earth. Here, in reviewing this field, some potentially fruitful research directions suggested by this change in perspective are highlighted. Variation and selection become, for example, bidirectional information flows between scales, while the notions of "cooperation" and "competition" become scale relative. The language of communication, inference, and information processing becomes more useful than the language of causation to describe the interactions of both homogeneous and heterogeneous living systems at any scale. Emerging scale-free theoretical frameworks such as predictive coding and active inference provide conceptual tools for reconceptualizing biology as the study of a unified, multiscale dynamical system.

How a growing organismal perspective is adding new depth to integrative studies of morphological evolution

Over the past half century, the field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, or Evo-devo, has integrated diverse fields of biology into a more synthetic understanding of morphological diversity. This has resulted in numerous insights into how development can evolve and reciprocally influence morphological evolution, as well as generated several novel theoretical areas. Although comparative by default, there remains a great gap in our understanding of adaptive morphological diversification and how developmental mechanisms influence the shape and pattern of phenotypic variation. Herein we highlight areas of research that are in the process of filling this void, and areas, if investigated more fully, that will add new insights into the diversification of morphology. At the centre of our discussion is an explicit awareness of organismal biology. Here we discuss an organismal framework that is supported by three distinct pillars. First, there is a need for Evo-devo to adopt a high-resolution phylogenetic approach in the study of morphological variation and its developmental underpinnings. Secondly, we propose that to understand the dynamic nature of morphological evolution, investigators need to give more explicit attention to the processes that generate evolutionarily relevant variation at the population level. Finally, we emphasize the need to address more thoroughly the processes that structure variation at micro- and macroevolutionary scales including modularity, morphological integration, constraint, and plasticity. We illustrate the power of these three pillars using numerous examples from both invertebrates and vertebrates to emphasize that many of these approaches are already present within the field, but have yet to be formally integrated into many research programs. We feel that the most exciting new insights will come where the traditional experimental approaches to Evo-devo are integrated more thoroughly with the principles of this organismal framework.

The second biennial meeting of the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology

Evodevo is concerned with understanding how phenotypes develop and evolve, how organismal diversity is generated and maintained, and how evolutionary innovations originate. The second Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology (PASEDB) meeting in Calgary, Canada, showcased a great variety of species and study systems, and a variety of approaches to address these questions. Although there were, like at the first PASEDB meeting, many developmental genetic and genomic studies, much of the work moved beyond comparative developmental genetics toward more integrative studies that seek explanations at different levels of the organismal hierarchy.