Symposium: Evolutionary Innovation; New Orleans, Louisiana; January, 2004

Society For Integrative And Comparative Biology, Herndon VA

Investigators

Abstract

0343073 Newman The project described is a Symposium on Evolutionary Innovation, to be held during the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 5-9, 2004. The symposium is a thematic continuation of previous symposia organized by the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology of the Society that also received support from the National Science Foundation. The goal of this symposium is to highlight a historically important area of evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo) that has received little attention from developmental and evolutionary biologists during much of the past century: evolutionary innovation. This is the question of how new phenotypic characters arise during phylogeny, a phenomenon not adequately addressed by investigations that focus solely on genetic variation. Recent advances in developmental biology, however, have brought to the fore mechanisms that can provide the bases, beyond incremental variation, of evolutionary novelties. The symposium, which is at the intersection of developmental and evolutionary biology, will be important for several reasons. First, individual investigators who have worked independently on the problem of innovation will be brought together to learn about the range of approaches that have been pursued. Second, the particular relevance of the topic of innovation for the new field of EvoDevo will be demonstrated to a wider audience. Third, the integration of empirical results into an expanded theoretical framework of evolution will be facilitated. Fourth, an emerging new research agenda pertaining explicitly to the developmental analysis of the problem of evolutionary innovation will be sharpened and will thus visibly enlarge the scope of EvoDevo. To achieve these goals, we have assembled a group of speakers who represent some of the most eminent people in their fields, who all have addressed the innovation issue in their work. It includes paleontologists who study the large scale patterns of innovation, developmental biologists who study specific cases in plants and animals, molecular biologists who concentrate on the evolution of the regulatory genome, computational biologists working on the evolution of development, and evolutionary biologists concerned with the implications of this kind of work for evolutionary theory. To our knowledge this will be the first comprehensive symposium on innovation directed to the community of EvoDevo researchers.