Abstract
Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is an inherently multidisciplinary area of contemporary biology. Although there are different perspectives on what evo-devo is and different formulations of the meaning of interdisciplinarity, I concentrate on the question of why evo-devo investigations exhibit such a diverse mixture of disciplinary contributors. One prominent answer is the complexity of the evolutionary and developmental phenomena under scrutiny, both with respect to their spatial levels of organization and the temporal scales on which causal interactions across these levels occur. This complexity in nature is translated into structured problem agendas for biologists that drive interdisciplinarity through organizing diverse research questions and coordinating distinct evaluative standards in relation to heterogeneous methods (e.g., what counts as relevant data or a good explanation). These problem agendas had been somewhat neglected in evolutionary biology and themselves change over time. I briefly illustrate some of these features with a well-known case study – the fin-limb transition – before concluding with several epistemological and sociological implications of interdisciplinarity in evo-devo.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for an excellent environment to think and write during the 2019–2020 project “Evolvability: A New and Unifying Concept in Evolutionary Biology?” led by Thomas Hansen and Christophe Pelabon. Ingo Brigandt and Laura Nuño de la Rosa provided helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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Love, A.C. (2021). Interdisciplinarity in Evo-Devo. In: Nuño de la Rosa, L., Müller, G.B. (eds) Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32979-6_65
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32979-6_65
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