Many ants have independently evolved castes with novel morphology as well as function,
such as soldiers and permanently wingless (ergatoid) queens. We present a conceptual …

An organism is built through a series of contingent factors, yet it is determined by historical,
physical, and developmental constraints. A constraint should not be understood as an …

Two sets of paired appendages are a characteristic feature of the body plan of jawed
vertebrates. While the fossil record provides a good morphological description of limb …

Evolutionary developmental biology of primates will be driven largely by the developmental
biology of the house mouse. Inferences from how known developmental perturbations …

A major challenge in systems biology is to understand the relationship between a circuit's
structure and its function, but how is this relationship affected if the circuit must perform …

Despite contingency in life's history, the similarity of evolutionarily convergent traits may
represent predictable solutions to common conditions. However, the extent to which overall …

The Drosophila segment polarity genes constitute the last tier in the segmentation cascade;
their job is to maintain the boundaries between parasegments and provide positional “read …

A major goal of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is to understand how
multicellular body plans of increasing complexity have evolved, and how the corresponding …

The construction of organisms from units that develop under semi–autonomous genetic
control (modules) has been proposed to be an important component of their ability to …

The diversity of animal and plant forms is shaped by nested evolutionary innovations.
Understanding the genetic and molecular changes responsible for these innovations is …