Eco-Evo-Devo: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Health, and Evolution

Recent discoveries in fields ranging from molecular and cell biology to ecology and evolution have given rise to 'ecological and evolutionary developmental biology' (or simply, 'eco-evo-devo'), the new science aimed at clarifying how the interplay between genes and environment shapes how organisms develop, interact, and evolve. Eco-Evo-Devo: The Environmental Regulation of Development, Health, and Evolution provides a synthetic overview of this new field, which merges evolution with ecological developmental biology. The book discusses such major themes as how multicellular organisms function, develop, and evolve as consortia of different symbiotic organisms, how many organisms can generate numerous traits depending on the environmental conditions they experience via phenotypic plasticity, and how living things have evolved several layers of inheritance that do not rely on the transmission of genes from parent to offspring. As the book details, these themes question many of our longstanding assumptions about how biology works, as well as having practical implications in preventing many diseases and mitigating biodiversity loss. Written for any undergraduate and graduate students with a basic knowledge of biology, Eco-Evo-Devo promises to stimulate new thinking about inheritance, development, ecology, evolution, and health.