Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The microscopic horse
- 2 What steers evolution?
- 3 Darwin: pluralism with a single core
- 4 How to build a body
- 5 A brief history of the last billion years
- 6 Preamble to the quiet revolution
- 7 The return of the organism
- 8 Possible creatures
- 9 The beginnings of bias
- 10 A deceptively simple question
- 11 Development's twin arrows
- 12 Action and reaction
- 13 Evolvability: organisms in bits
- 14 Back to the trees
- 15 Stripes and spots
- 16 Towards ‘the inclusive synthesis’
- 17 Social creatures
- Glossary
- References
- Index
12 - Action and reaction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The microscopic horse
- 2 What steers evolution?
- 3 Darwin: pluralism with a single core
- 4 How to build a body
- 5 A brief history of the last billion years
- 6 Preamble to the quiet revolution
- 7 The return of the organism
- 8 Possible creatures
- 9 The beginnings of bias
- 10 A deceptively simple question
- 11 Development's twin arrows
- 12 Action and reaction
- 13 Evolvability: organisms in bits
- 14 Back to the trees
- 15 Stripes and spots
- 16 Towards ‘the inclusive synthesis’
- 17 Social creatures
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
As I mentioned earlier, I started off my academic training in the field of ecology, moved sideways into ecological genetics for my Ph.D. and the following few years, and then moved sideways again into evodevo. In Chapter 3, I discussed an accident that played a major role in initiating the latter sideways shift. In the best tradition of Star Wars, here, later, is the rather less accidental story behind the former shift – ‘Episode 1’, if you like.
By the time I reached the final year of my B.Sc., I had developed a particular interest in evolution. I wanted to conduct my final-year research project in that area – but how? My tutors were mostly ecologists, so they weren't adept at finding dinosaur bones. But that didn't matter, as I was (and still am) primarily interested in the operation of evolutionary mechanisms rather than the reconstruction of evolutionary history. (I have become more interested in history – both evolutionary and scientific – with age, as tends to happen to people, but it is still not my main focus of attention.)
So the task at hand was to choose an evolutionary project that was ‘doable’, and a species on which to do it. In the end, I came up with a project that involved comparison of shell shape between two populations of a species of pondsnail that inhabited very different types of environment. At first sight, this seemed like a wonderful ‘adaptive scenario’; and this was in the days before that phrase took on a disreputable flavour and became associated with the derogatory expression ‘story telling’ – in the sense of plausible but not rigorously tested hypotheses.
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- Biased Embryos and Evolution , pp. 139 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004