Evolutionary Developmental Biology

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Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) was instituted in the early 1980s as a distinctive field of study to characterise the new synthesis of evolution hypothesis (Müller, 2007). Evo-devo is regarded as a new rule in evolutionary biology and a complement to neo-Darwinian theories. It has formed from the combination of molecular developmental biology and evolutionary molecular genetics; their integration has helped greatly to understand both of these fields. Evo-devo as a discipline has been exploring the role of the process of individual development and the changes in evolutionary phenotype, meaning the developmental procedure by which single-celled zygotes grow to be multicellular organisms. Alterations in the developmental program frequently cause differences in adult morphology. When these alterations are helpful, they grow to be fixed in a population and can result in the evolution of new phyla. Evo-devo seeks to figure out how new groups happen by understanding how the method of development has evolved in different lineages. In other word, evo-devo explains the interaction between phenotype and genotype (Hall, 2007). Explanation of morphological novelty of evolutionary origins is one of the middle challenges in current evolutionary biology, and is intertwined with energetic discussion regarding how to connect developmental biology to standard perspectives from the theory of evolution (Laubichler, 2010). A large amount of theoretical and experiential effort is being devoted to novelties that have challenged biologists for more than one hundred years, for instance, the basis of fins in fish, the fin-to-limb change and the evolution of feathers. The biology of development promises to formulate a main contribution to these...

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...is. Moreover, the relationship between neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and evo-devo is highly contested (Hoekstra and Coyne, 2007; Minelli, 2010). However, the understanding of evo-devo methods and how the characteristics of the morphologies of different species diverged eventually is still comparatively limited. Craig (2010) stated that this field has obviously contributed to the understanding of genes and, subsequently, the understanding morphological characteristics of evolution in intricate organisms. There has been significant confirmation of evo-devo’s claim that regulatory modifications play an essential role in the evolution of shape. Evo-devo is the process of becoming a conceptual hub for an even larger integration of research areas in organismal biology, including genetics, ecology, paleontology, behavior, cognition, and other fields (Gerd B. Müller)

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