Development and Evolution: The Physics Connection

Abstract

This chapter argues that although Darwin aspired to a materialist understanding of evolution, his theory was imbued (in accordance with the physics of his time) with a notion of organisms as passively molded products of their circumstances. The Modern Synthesis that followed from this failed to incorporate new discoveries of physical processes relevant to the formation and transformation of morphological phenotypes and therefore never moved beyond an increasingly obsolete incrementalism it inherited from its originating doctrine. It is proposed here that the emergence of the most distinctive aspects of evolutionary developmental biology in the late twentieth century was due less to insights from comparative genomics than to a growing recognition by a group of cross-disciplinary scientists of the dynamic, nonlinear and plastic nature of developing systems: in particular, the role of physical processes that were unknown to the early evolutionists in producing predictable and often abruptly changing body plans and other morphological motifs.