Challenging the Modern Synthesis: Adaptation, Development, and Inheritance

364 Pages·2017·21.42 MB·English

by  Philippe Huneman

CHALLENGING THE MODERN SYNTHESIS

CHALLENGING
THE MODERN
SYNTHESIS
Adaptation, Development, and
Inheritance
Edited by
Philippe Huneman and Denis M. Walsh
1
1
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CONTENTS
Contributors vii
Introduction: Challenging the Modern Synthesis—D enis M. Walsh
and Philippe Huneman 1
PART I: Adaptation and Selection
1. Natural Selection, Adaptation, and the Recovery of Development—
David J. Depew 37
2. Why Would We Call for a New Evolutionary Synthesis? The Variation
Issue and the Explanatory Alternatives—P hilippe Huneman 68
3. Genetic Assimilation and the Paradox of Blind Variation—
Arnaud Pocheville and Étienne Danchin 111
4. Evolutionary Theory Evolving—P atrick Bateson 137
PART II: Development
5. Evo- Devo and the Structure(s) of Evolutionary Theory: A Different
Kind of Challenge—A lan C. Love 159
vi • Contents
6. Toward a Nonidealist Evolutionary Synthesis— Stuart A. Newman 188
7. Evolvability and Its Evolvability— Alessandro Minelli 211
8. “Chance Caught on the Wing”: Metaphysical Commitment or
Methodological Artifact?—D enis M. Walsh 239
PART III: Inheritance
9. Limited Extended Inheritance— Francesca Merlin 263
10. Heredity and Evolutionary Theory—T obias Uller and
Heikki Helanterä 280
11. Serial Homology as a Challenge to Evolutionary Theory: The
Repeated Parts of Organisms from Idealistic Morphology to
Evo- Devo—S téphane Schmitt 317
Index 349
CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick Bateson is emeritus professor of ethology at the University of Cambridge.
Much of his scientific career has been concerned with bridging the gap between
the studies of behavior and those of underlying mechanisms, focusing on the
process of behavioral imprinting in birds. Another aspect of his work was on the
development of play and the induction of alternative pathways in cats depending
on their early experience. Subsequently he has published extensively on develop-
ment and evolution, including the modern study of epigenetics.
Étienne Danchin is director of research at the French CNRS at the Evolution &
Diversité Biologique (EDB) laboratoire in Toulouse gathering 60 academics, plus
about 50 PhD and postdoc students. He coleads the Laboratoire of Excellence
TULIP that regroups 5 laboratories totaling 400 staff. He is an expert in behav-
ioral ecology, on which he wrote a textbook for Oxford University Press. His
fields of interest range from social information use in habitat and mate choices to
the evolution of coloniality in birds, and nongenetic inheritance (epigenetic and
cultural), as well as information flows as determinants of ecological and evolu-
tionary dynamics. He advocates the necessity to generalize the modern synthesis
of evolution into an inclusive evolutionary synthesis incorporating all dimen-
sions of nongenetic inheritance.
David J. Depew is professor emeritus of rhetoric of inquiry at the University of
Iowa. His work is in the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of evolutionary biology,
with special interest in the history and conceptual foundations of the modern
evolutionary synthesis. He is the coauthor, with Bruce H. Weber, of Darwinism
Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (1995); with
the late Marjorie Grene of Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History (2005); and
most recently with John P. Jackson of an extended study of interactions between
anthropologists and evolutionary biologists in 20th- century America.
Heikki Helanterä is an evolutionary biologist with his main focus in social evo-
lution. His research tackles the causes and consequences of variation in social
viii • Contributors
traits at both individual and group levels, and employs a wide range of methods
from theoretical and conceptual work to genomic, population genetic, compar-
ative, and behavioral studies. He has published over 50 papers and is currently a
Kone Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Philippe Huneman  is a research director at the Institut d’Histoire et
de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/U niversité Paris
I Sorbonne). A philosopher of biology, he works and publishes papers on issues
related to evolutionary biology, on the concept of organism and its relations to
Kant’s metaphysics, and on kinds of explanation in biology and ecology (with
a focus on structural/t opological explanations). He has edited several books,
including Understanding Purpose: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy of Biology (2007),
Functions: Selection and Mechanisms (2013); From Groups to Individuals (2013,
with F. Bouchard); and Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences (2015,
with T. Heams, G. Lecointre, M. Silberstein). He is coeditor of the book series
History, Philosophy, and Theory in Life Sciences.
Alan C. Love is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Minnesota and Director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science.
His areas of specialization are philosophy of biology and philosophy of sci-
ence. Alan’s research focuses on a variety of conceptual issues in evolution-
ary and developmental biology with an emphasis on philosophical questions
about conceptual change, explanatory pluralism, the structure of evolutionary
theory, reductionism, the nature of historical science, and interdisciplinary
epistemology.
Francesca Merlin is researcher in philosophy of biology at CNRS (IHPST,
UMR 8590, Paris, France). She obtained a PhD in philosophy at Université Paris
1— Panthéon Sorbonne in 2009. Her research focuses on central concepts in biol-
ogy such as chance and probability, inheritance and epigenetics, in particular in
the context of evolutionary theory. She currently works on the extension of bio-
logical inheritance in the light of the fact that organisms inherit much more than
DNA. She is a recipient of the 2010 Young Researcher Prize from the Société de
Philosophie des Sciences in France. She published Mutations et aléas: Le hasard
dans la théorie de l’évolution (2013). She has also coedited, with Thierry Hoquet,
Précis de philosophie de la biologie (2014).
Alessandro Minelli was full professor of zoology at the University of Padua,
Italy, until his retirement in 2011; he has been vice president (1997– 1999) of the
European Society for Evolutionary Biology. For several years his research focus
was biological systematics— the subject of his book Biological Systematics: The
State of the Art (1993)— but since the mid- 1990s his research interests have turned
toward evolutionary developmental biology, the subject of his monographs The
Contributors • ix
Development of Animal Form (2003) and Perspectives in Animal Phylogeny and
Evolution (2009). He is currently serving as specialty editor- in- chief for evolu-
tionary developmental biology of Frontiers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Stuart A. Newman is professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical
College, where he directs a research program in developmental biology. He has
contributed to several scientific fields, including cell differentiation and pattern
formation, the theory of biochemical networks, protein folding and assembly,
and the mechanisms of morphological evolution. He has also written on the
social and cultural dimensions of developmental biology. He is coauthor (with
Gabor Forgacs) of Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo (2005), and coedi-
tor (with Gerd B. Müller) of Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene
in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology (2003) and (with Karl J. Niklas) of
Multicellularity: Origins and Evolution (2016). He is editor- in- chief of Biological
Theory, the journal of the KLI (Klosterneuburg, Austria).
Arnaud Pocheville is a theoretical biologist and a philosopher of biology, cur-
rently a research fellow at the University of Sydney, working on the project
‘Causal Foundations of Biological Information’ headed by Paul E. Griffiths. He
holds a PhD in Life Sciences from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He advo-
cates that we need new concepts and mathematical approaches to handle cases
of time-scales and levels entanglements in biology. He has worked in particular
on the evo/devo entanglement in relation to niche construction and non-genetic
inheritance.
Stéphane Schmitt is a research director at the French Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (Paris). He works on the history of the life sciences, espe-
cially in the 18th and 19th centuries. He has published many books and papers
on the history of anatomy, embryology, and the sciences of evolution, and is the
main editor of Buffon’s Œuvres complètes (2007– , 9 volumes published to date).
Tobias Uller is an evolutionary biologist. His current work focuses on the rela-
tions between development, heredity, and evolution by studying the evolutionary
causes and consequences of developmental plasticity and parental effects. He has
published over 130 papers on a broad range of topics in ecology and evolution
and currently holds a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship and a Senior Lectureship
at Lund University, Sweden.
Denis M. Walsh is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, the Institute for
the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the Department of
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He is author of
Organisms, Agency and Evolution (2015).