ABSTRACT
Evolutionary biology is experiencing greatly renewed interest in development. As recently as 1988, Futuyma in his Presidential Address to the Society for the Study of Evolution noted that understanding how the dynamics of development influence evolutionary rates and direction is perhaps the most glaring deficiency in modern evolutionary theory. But after decades of focusing on the evolution of genes and adults, evolutionary biologists are once again beginning to acknowledge that it is individual development (i.e., ontogeny) that evolves, not genes or adults. Gene mutations may underlie such developmental evolution and modified adults are products of this. However, viewing evolution as adaptation through altered ontogeny provides many insights, as reviewed in a rapidly growing literature (e.g., Hall, 1992; McKinney & McNamara, 1991; McNamara, 1997; Raff, 1996).
