Eco-evo-devo: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Health, and Evolution

Recent discoveries in fields ranging from molecular and cell biology to ecology and evolution have given rise to 'ecological and evolutionary developmental biology' (or simply, 'eco-evo-devo'), the new science aimed at clarifying how the interplay between genes and environment shapes how organisms develop, interact, and evolve.

Eco-Evo-Devo: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Health, and Evolution provides a synthetic overview of this new field, which merges evolution with ecological developmental biology. The book discusses such major themes as how multicellular organisms function, develop, and evolve as consortia of different symbiotic organisms, how many organisms can generate numerous traits depending on the environmental conditions they experience via phenotypic plasticity, and how living things have evolved several layers of inheritance that do not rely on the transmission of genes from parent to offspring. As the book details, these themes question many of our longstanding assumptions about how biology works, as well as having practical implications in preventing many diseases and mitigating biodiversity loss.

Written for any undergraduate and graduate students with a basic knowledge of biology, Eco-Evo-Devo promises to stimulate new thinking about inheritance, development, ecology, evolution, and health.

Scott F. Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology, emeritus, at Swarthmore College, where he has taught developmental genetics, embryology, and the history and critiques of biology. He is also a Finland Distinguished Professor, emeritus, at the University of Helsinki. He received his B.A. in both biology and religion from Wesleyan University and he earned his PhD in biology and his MA in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University. His research has investigated how developmental alterations caused by changes in gene expression or symbiosis can cause selectable variation.

David W. Pfennig is Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin and was previously on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is co-author of numerous scientific papers and two books: Evolution's Wedge: Competition and the Origins of Diversity (2012) and Phenotypic Plasticity: Causes, Consequences, Controversies (2021).