Elsevier

Developmental Biology

Volume 264, Issue 1, 1 December 2003, Pages 15-37
Developmental Biology

Review article
The evolution of developmental mechanisms

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0012-1606(03)00353-1Get rights and content
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Abstract

Over the past two to three decades, developmental biology has demonstrated that all multicellular organisms in the animal kingdom share many of the same molecular building blocks and many of the same regulatory genetic pathways. Yet we still do not understand how the various organisms use these molecules and pathways to assume all the forms we know today. Evolutionary developmental biology tackles this problem by comparing the development of one organism to another and comparing the genes involved and gene functions to understand what makes one organism different from another. In this review, we revisit a set of seven concepts defined by Lewis Wolpert (fate maps, asymmetric division, induction, competence, positional information, determination, and lateral inhibition) that describe the characters of many developmental systems and supplement them with three additional concepts (developmental genomics, genetic redundancy, and genetic networks). We will discuss examples of comparative developmental studies where these concepts have guided observations on the advent of a developmental novelty. Finally, we identify a set of evolutionary frameworks, such as developmental constraints, cooption, duplication, parallel and convergent evolution, and homoplasy, to adequately describe the evolutionary properties of developmental systems.

Keywords

Evolution and development
Fate maps
Asymmetric cell division
Induction
Developmental genomics
Competence
Redundancy
Positional information
Determination
Lateral inhibition
Gene networks
C. elegans
Volvox
Cavefish
Threespine stickleback fish
Drosophila
Tribolium
Mouse
Phylogeny
Satellite systems
Parallel evolution
Convergent evolution
Homoplasy

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