5 Apr 2013
Sean Rice
Department of Biological Sciences
Texas Tech University
If the study of developmental evolution is to be anything more than comparative developmental biology – meaning if it is to be a mechanistic study of how and why developmental processes evolve as they do – then it must deal with the complexities of populations and transmission. Unfortunately, traditional population and quantitative genetics theory is ill suited to study the evolution of development. I will discuss how we can modify formal evolutionary theory to address the evolution of developmental processes, and show how this theory yields insight into the evolutionary forces that shape development. I will then introduce some recent work that seeks to make the formal theory directly applicable to the kinds of data that we can get from natural populations.