Developmental biology is the study of the process by which animals and plants grow and develop. Developmental biology also encompasses the biology of regeneration, asexual reproduction, metamorphosis, and the growth and differentiation of stem cells in the adult organism.
Zoology is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the structure, embryology, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems. Zoology is one of the primary branches of biology. The term is derived from Ancient Greek ζῷον, zōion ('animal'), and λόγος, logos.
Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved.
The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local populations.
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed onto their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology.
Conrad Hal Waddington was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
In evolutionary developmental biology, heterochrony is any genetically controlled difference in the timing, rate, or duration of a developmental process in an organism compared to its ancestors or other organisms. This leads to changes in the size, shape, characteristics and even presence of certain organs and features. It is contrasted with heterotopy, a change in spatial positioning of some process in the embryo, which can also create morphological innovation. Heterochrony can be divided into intraspecific heterochrony, variation within a species, and interspecific heterochrony, phylogenetic variation, i.e. variation of a descendant species with respect to an ancestral species.
The ParaHox gene cluster is an array of homeobox genes from the Gsx, Xlox (Pdx) and Cdx gene families.
Rupert Riedl was an Austrian zoologist.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
In biology, saltation is a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation. This was historically offered as an alternative to Darwinism. Some forms of mutationism were effectively saltationist, implying large discontinuous jumps.
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.
Wallace Arthur is an evolutionary biologist and science writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Galway. His most recent book is Understanding Life in the Universe, published by Cambridge University Press, which focuses on the likely extent and nature of extraterrestrial life. He was one of the founding editors of the journal Evolution & Development, serving as an editor for nearly 20 years. He has held visiting positions at Harvard University, Darwin College Cambridge, and the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland.
Biological Theory is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the fields of evolution and cognition, including cognitive psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology, and developmental biology. It was established in 2005 and originally published by MIT Press, sponsored by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI). As of January 1, 2012, the publisher is Springer Science+Business Media. The first editor-in-chief was Werner Callebaut of the KLI and the University of Vienna). The current editor-in-chief is Stuart A. Newman of New York Medical College.
Alessandro Minelli is an Italian biologist, formerly professor of zoology in the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences of the University of Padova mainly working on evo-devo subjects.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to evolution:
The extended evolutionary synthesis consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis was called for in the 1950s by C. H. Waddington, argued for on the basis of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reconceptualized in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller. Notably, Dr. Müller concluded from this research that Natural Selection has no way of explaining speciation, saying: “selection has no innovative capacity...the generative and the ordering aspects of morphological evolution are thus absent from evolutionary theory.”
Scott Frederick Gilbert is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and historian of biology.
Human evolutionary developmental biology or informally human evo-devo is the human-specific subset of evolutionary developmental biology. Evolutionary developmental biology is the study of the evolution of developmental processes across different organisms. It is utilized within multiple disciplines, primarily evolutionary biology and anthropology. Groundwork for the theory that "evolutionary modifications in primate development might have led to … modern humans" was laid by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Ernst Haeckel, Louis Bolk, and Adolph Schultz. Evolutionary developmental biology is primarily concerned with the ways in which evolution affects development, and seeks to unravel the causes of evolutionary innovations.
Barbara Ambrose is a botanist working in the field of Plant Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo). As the Director of Laboratory Research at the New York Botanical Garden, Ambrose is a prolific scholar and leader and mentor in her field who is interested in patterns in plant diversity on macro and micro scales.
