http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/evolution_of_hormone_signaling.php
- Cooption. Add this one to your list of synonyms. First there
was the term "preadaptation" with its unfortunate teleological
implications; then Gould & Vrba coined the better term
"exaptation"; nowadays the magic word you hear most used by
developmental biologists is "cooption." The idea here is that modules
get coopted, or used in novel circumstances, to generate new functional
and morpholical properties. - Life History Transitions (LHTs) and Life History Evolution (LHE).
One of the hot topics in evo-devo is a conceptual move, to stop
regarding adult forms as the target of evolution and instead regard
species more holistically, as the sum of all of their stages of
development. A tick, for instance, is more than just the nasty parasite
that sucks your blood; it may also have distinct and amazingly complex
life cycles in which it lives in different environments and has
radically different feeding strategies, and we have to take all of them
into account in understanding their evolution. Arthur’s Biased Embryos and Evolution is an excellent primer on the importance of life history evolution. - Model Systems. As a guy who works with a model system, the
zebrafish, the evo-devo argument against them always makes me a little
uncomfortable, because they are largely right. Model systems are great
for plumbing deeply into the details of an organism, but the flaws are
that model systems are rarely very representative (Danio is a weird little specialized fish, no doubt about it), and that you must at some point explore comparative aspects of their development if you want to discuss evolution.
The lesson the authors are trying to leave us with is that hormone
signaling is a rich field to study within an evolutionary context, and
that the pattern of hormone use tells us a great deal about origins and
mechanisms of evolutionary novelties.
