This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, ...

Morphological EvoDevo is a field of biological inquiry in which explicit relations between evolutionary patterns and growth or morphogenetic processes are made. Historically, morphological EvoDevo results from the coming together of several traditions, notably Naturphilosophie, embryology, the study of heterochrony, and developmental constraints. A special feature binding different approaches to morphological EvoDevo is the use of formalisms and mathematical models. Here we will introduce anatomical network analysis, a new approach centered on connectivity patterns formed by anatomical parts, with its own (...) concepts and tools specifically designed for the study of morphological EvoDevo questions. Riedl’s concept of burden is tightly related to the use of anatomical networks, providing a nexus between the evolutionary patterns and the structural constraints that shape them. (shrink)

In September 2008, 10 years after the untimely death of Pere Alberch (1954–1998), the 20th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology gathered a group of Pere’s students, col- laborators, and colleagues (Figure 1) to celebrate his contribu- tions to the origins of EvoDevo. Hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) outside Vienna, the group met for two days of discussion. The meeting was organized in tandem with a congress held in May 2008 at the Cavanilles Institute (...) for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (ICBiBE) in Valencia, Spain. The talks at the KLI were equal parts: nostalgic remembrance, excitement over new ways of thinking about old problems, and an unrepressed vitriol against the resurgence of reductionist thinking in EvoDevo. Here we highlight some of the key aspects of Pere’s life and work that informed and infused the talks. (shrink)

Morphospaces are theoretical tools to explore the morphological organization of living and fossil organisms. They have been used mostly by the paleontological community in an effort to get the most out of one of the only pieces of evidence that fossil material usually provide: the morphology of hard parts. The expectation with the establishment of theoretical morphospaces is that, by abstracting and modeling the fundamental parts of form, the multiple processes that generate the phenotypes of embryonic and adult structures will (...) be better understood. In this essay, we suggest that ontogenetic trajectories can be used as the generative functions that build morphospaces, and propose approaches to build theoretical models for the establishment of left–right asymmetries during vertebrate heart embryogenesis. BioEssays 26:405–412, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The theory of Punctuated Equilibria challenges the neo‐Darwinian tenet that evolution is a uniform process. Recently, an article by Hunt1 has found that directional change during the evolution of a lineage is relatively small (occurring only in 5% of 250 analyzed traits). Of those traits that were shown to follow a trend, size was more likely to show gradual changes, whereas shape changes were more random. Here, we provide a short view of the nature of evolutionary trends, showing that directional (...) change within lineages and among clades provides valuable evolutionary information about the processes involved in their generation. BioEssays 30:521–525, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)