There has been a conceptual revolution in the biological sciences over the past several
decades. Evidence from genetics, embryology, and developmental biology has converged …

Homology is an essential idea of biology, referring to the historical continuity of characters,
but it is also conceptually highly elusive. The main difficulty is the apparently loose …

Understanding how complex traits, such as epithelia, nervous systems, muscles, or guts,
originated depends on a well-supported hypothesis about the phylogenetic relationships …

Many regulatory genes appear to be utilized in at least superficially similar ways in the
development of particular body parts in Drosophila and in chordates. These similarities have …

The evolutionary origin of the angiosperms (flowering plants sensu stricto) is still enigmatic.
Answers to the question of angiosperm origins are intimately connected to the identification …

Cases of convergent evolution that involve changes in the same developmental pathway,
called parallelism, provide evidence that a limited number of developmental changes are …

Dollo's Law, the idea that the loss of complex features in evolution is irreversible, is a
popular concept in evolutionary biology. Here we review how application of recent …

The major goal of ecological evolutionary developmental biology, also known as “eco-evo-
devo,” is to uncover the rules that underlie the interactions between an organism's …

Defining 'plants' inclusively as 'photosynthetic eukaryotes', four basic body plans are
identifiable among plant lineages (unicellular, siphonous, colonial and multicellular). All of …

Our recently acquired understanding of the ABC program, which controls floral organ identity
in model plant species such as Arabidopsis thaliana and Antirrhinum majus, has provided a …