Evolution of Development

Abstract

Research in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘evo‐devo’, addresses how genetic differences result in changes in development between individuals, populations or species. Evolutionary developmental biology has its roots in comparative embryology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the fields of evolution and development diverged soon thereafter. Advances in developmental genetics in the 1970s and 1980s, combined with the discovery that distantly related organisms share key regulatory genes and processes, provided new avenues of research in the field. Today, the strong interest in evo‐devo illustrates that evolutionary biologists, geneticists and molecular biologists increasingly wish to understand how genotypic differences are translated via development into phenotypic diversity. The combination of traditional developmental biology approaches, genomics‐era techniques and functional genetic tools has made evo‐devo studies possible in a wide range of organisms. Key Concepts Evolutionary developmental biology is the study of how developmental differences result in phenotypic diversity. Homologous regulatory genes often have similar functions in even distantly related species. New phenotypes are able to evolve because of enhancer modularity, which allows regulatory genes to evolve new functions while maintaining previously established functions. Genomic technologies and the expansion of functional tools have resulted in the democratisation of organisms that can be used to study evolutionary developmental questions.