From Darwin to Evo-Devo

"All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike."

-         Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859
 

"The enigma of genetic diversity and genome-­phenome organization and evolution in nature has been fruitfully explored by using modern molecular techniques. Genotypic and phenotypic diversity has been found in all species at the protein, DNA, and organismal levels. Genome­-phenome organization in nature is nonrandom, heavily structured, and correlated with abiotic and environmental diversity and stress. Deciphering the origin and maintenance of genetic diversity will be enhanced through investigations focusing on the interface between ecology and genomics. Critical tests and strong inferences in nature of abiotic and biotic factors include transplant experiments at microscales and macroscales, to unravel genome organization and fitness in contrasting and changing environments and to relate genomics to phenomics."

-          Eviatar Nevo, PNAS 68:6239, 2001

"[Facilitated variation is] an explanation of the organism's generation of complex phenotypic change from a small number of random changes of the genotype. We posit that the conserved components greatly facilitate evolutionary change by reducing the amount of genetic change required to generate phenotypic novelty, principally through their reuse in new combinations and in different parts of their adaptive ranges of performance."

-          Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life, 2006

"My central argument here is that a mature and complete theory of evolution that is truly worthy of the label "synthesis" must include developmental reprogramming on an equal basis with mutation and selection. These three together [...] can potentially provide a complete explanation of the evolution of development."

-          Wallace Arthur, Evolution & Development 2:49, 2000

"Although there is an endless diversity of form in the animal kingdom, species of unrelated phyla, such as arthropods, nematodes and vertebrates, share a surprisingly high number of regulatory genes. Underneath the variation in morphological and developmental design lies a related molecular program. It has been argued that animal diversity relies on the differential use of similar components by first the participation of one gene product in diverse genetic networks, and second a functional diversification through changes in the molecular specificity of proteins. Thus, it is the function of genes, and the regulatory linkage of these genes in more complex genetic networks that change during the course of evolution. Only a comparison of related, but nonetheless distinct, organisms will enable us to obtain and interpret changes in gene function in homologous developmental systems.

This approach will provide the opportunity eventually to take comparative developmental biology to a mechanistic level."

-          A. Eizinger, B. Jungblut, & Ralf Sommer, Trends in Genetics 15:197, 1999

"Thus, as it seems to me, the leading facts in embryology, which are second in importance to none in natural history, are explained on the principle of slight modifications not appearing, in the many descendants from someone ancient progenitor, at a very early period in the life of each, though perhaps caused at the earliest, and being inherited at a corresponding not early period. Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals."

-         Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859

From "Darwin to Evo-Devo" scientific committee: 

Aaron Ciechanover , Benjamin Podbilewicz , Ram Reshef , Itai Yanai