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 re-invent the wheel, and to obfuscate the terminology of the field, since many concepts in evo-devo relate to similar or even identical phenomena, without being entirely clear what they mean. This proble