Theory in Evo Devo Beyond Networks: The Evolution of Living Systems

Module 11 of Beyond Networks considers the strange and quixotic quest for a unified synthetic theory of evolution, and looks at the interface between scientific argumentation and academic politics in evolutionary biology. In this lecture, I take you on a tour of theoretical arguments and models for the integration of development into evolutionary theory that have come from evolutionary developmental biology: from Riedl and Gould to Gerhart and Kirschner. A comparison of these models reveals that all of them are formulated verbally and qualitatively only and, in many cases, it remains unclear how they relate to each other precisely. From a perspectivist standpoint, the disunity of these models need not bother us too much, but the often vague definition of concepts leads to a tendency to reinvent the wheel, and to obfuscate the terminology of the field, since many concepts in evodevo relate to similar or even identical phenomena, without being entirely clear what they mean. This proble