Evolving Pathways: Key Themes in Evolutionary Developmental Biology

Evolutionary developmental biology, or 'evo-devo', is the study of the relationship between evolution and development. Dealing specifically with the generative mechanisms of organismal form, evo-devo goes straight to the core of the developmental origin of variation, the raw material on which natural selection (and random drift) can work. Evolving Pathways responds to the growing volume of data in this field, and its potential to answer fundamental questions in biology, by bringing together contributions that represent a diversity of approaches. Topics range from developmental genetics to comparative morphology of animals and plants alike, and also include botany and palaeontology, two disciplines for which the potential to be examined from an evo-devo perspective has largely been ignored until now. Researchers and graduate students will find this book a valuable overview of current research as we begin to fill a major gap in our perception of evolutionary change.

Alessandro Minelli is currently Professor of Zoology at the University of Padova, Italy. An honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, he was a founding member and Vice-President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. He has served as President of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, and is on the editorial board of multiple learned journals, including Evolution Development. He is the author of The Development of Animal Form (2003). Giuseppe Fusco is Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of Padova, Italy where he teaches Evolutionary Biology. His main research work is in the morphological evolution and post-embryonic development of arthropods, with particular reference to the role of segmentation in the Chilopoda.