Morphological Innovations

Symposium organized by Gerd B. Müller and Stuart A. Newman

RATIONALE

This symposium is a thematic continuation of previous programs organized by the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. The symposium will highlight an important area of evolutionary developmental biology which has largely been ignored by earlier research agendas: morphological innovation. How new phenotypic characters arise during phylogeny is a question that has not been adequately addressed by the traditional focus on adaptive variation. Recent advances in developmental biology have brought to the fore mechanisms that can provide the generative bases, beyond incremental variation, of phenotypic novelties. The talks, all pertaining to the intersection of development and evolution, will represent perspectives from different levels of analysis. These include paleontology, which addresses large scale patterns of innovation, developmental biology, which provides specific cases in plants and animals, molecular biological approaches to the evolution of the regulatory genome, theoretical biology, which is producing predictive computational and analytical models, and evolutionary biology, represented by investigators who are attempting to incorporate an EvoDevo approach to innovation into an expanded theoretical framework for evolution.

MORNING

AFTERNOON