Document type
Book chapters
Title
Causing and Composing Evolution: Lessons from Evo-Devo Mechanisms
Participants in the publication
Cristina Villegas (Author)
Dep. História e Filosofia das Ciências
Summary
Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is often vindicated by theoreticians of the field as a mechanistic science that brings a mechanistic perspective into evolutionary biology. Usually, it is also portrayed as stressing the causal role that development plays in the evolutionary process. However, mechanistic studies in evo-devo typically refer to lineage-specific transformations and lack the generality that evolutionary explanations usually aim for. After reviewing the prospects and limits of a mechanistic view of evo-devo and their studies of homology and novelty, in this chapter I propose a way to combine the mechanistic view of evo-devo with the population-level inclination of more classical approaches to evolution. Such a proposal provides a philosophical framework for understanding the causal role of development in evolution both as mechanistic and as generalizable, population-level.
Editor(s)
J. Cordovil, G. Santos, and D. Vecchi
Date of Publication
2023-12-13
Institution
FACULDADE DE CIÊNCIAS DA UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA
Where published
New Mechanism: Explanation, Emergence and Reduction
Publication Identifiers
Publisher
Springer
Collection
History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences
Starting page
61
Last page
83
Document Identifiers
DOI -
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46917-6_4
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