{pdf} The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo Ron Amundson

This gives a great view of the history of evo-devo. My supervisor, one of the reviewers of the book, had joked that it was fantastic “even though it was written by a philosopher”.

Admundson gives a great analysis on the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and its dominance in biological thought. As well, the section on heredity was fantastic as I had been mulling these same ideas over for some time before I came across this, which really helped crystalize things. In short, the notion of heredity was pirated from developmental biology by the geneticists(T Morgan and followers), and this had long term consequences for developmental biology in evolutionary theory. Perfect example today is that “heritability” is stricly a population level concept, which is at odds whith heredity as understood by developmental biologist. However, it seems clear that “heritability” in the individual is a neessary precondition to detection of “heritability” in a population. Failing to recognize the importance of “developmental heredity” will mean that the neo-darwinian synthesis will be incomplete.

Get this book. If you don’t know the history of your discipline, you can’t understand it fully.