Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Molds, Molecules, and Metazoa: Growing Points in Evolutionary Biology by Peter R. Grant;
Henry S. Horn
Review by: Rick Grosberg
Ecology, Vol. 74, No. 5 (Jul., 1993), pp. 1603-1605
Published by: Ecological Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1940089 .
Accessed: 27/01/2015 04:04
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Ecological Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ecology.
http://www.jstor.org
REVIEWS
Molds, molecules, and metazoa. growingpoints in evolutionary biology contains a series of essays derived from a
symposium to celebrate the career of John Bonner. The editors of the collection of essays claim that, "the theme of the
symposium was simply evolution," and that the six authors
"were invited to contribute to the symposium by charting the
future course at six major growing points in the study of
evolution." This is a rather bold invitation, and the fact of
the matter is that most of the authors appropriately limit their
analyses to the two intriguing questions that Bonner poses in
the opening chapter: "why does one have development at all,
and since one does, how is it affected by evolution?" All six
remaining papers in the symposium address these questions
on levels of resolution ranging from geological to physiological
time, and from paleontological, behavioral, ecological, morphological, and molecular perspectives.
The first of the six "prospective" chapters, by James Valentine, chronicles the explosive history of early metazoan
diversification, and then considers two facets of the pattern
of diversification. First, Valentine seeks to understand why
so many body plans evolved, and evolved so rapidly, during
the earliest annals of the Metazoa. He offers the deceptively
simple answer that by the late Vendian/early Cambrian, enough
different types of cells had evolved so that they could collaborate to form histologically and functionally complex tissues
and organs. This, in turn, promoted the diversification of body
plans. The second issue concerns the identification of diagnostic attributes of major taxa that could explain macroevolutionary patterns of persistence and failure. In principle, this
amounts to an argument against Stephen Jay Gould's view
that the history of life is largely a lesson in historical stochasticity (see, for example, Gould's (1989) book Wonderful
life. W. W. Norton, New York). Like Valentine, I find such
interpretations frustrating because they are often explicitly or
1604
REVIEWS
behavioral processes, like developmental processes, are "condition-sensitive." After reading the chapter several times, I
remain uncertain exactly what "condition-sensitive" means:
at times the term appears to refer to adaptive phenotypic
plasticity, in which the phenotype of an organism changes
(reversibly or not) in response to the environment. At other
times, "condition-sensitive" seems more inclusive, such that
phenotypic response (or phenotype, itself) depends on both
the condition of the organism and the condition of the environment. In turn, the condition of the organism depends
on the individual and collective properties of its genes, as well
as previous experience, nutritional status, etc. The adaptively
optimal phenotype may therefore vary according to the internal and external state of the organism. Whatever the correct
interpretation of "condition-sensitive," this ambiguity incited me to read further. The debatable heuristic foundation
of West-Eberhard's argument is that a new post-Darwinian
kind of typological thinking about species has replaced preDarwinian typology. The "old" typology held that species are
essentially phenotypically invariant; the "new" typology assumes that species vary, but the distribution of the variance
is unimodal and normal. As she puts the "new" dogma, "populations are unimodally adapted." She continues, "So, to get
two adaptive peaks, or modes, you must have a branch."
Thus, in the traditional wisdom, speciation is at the heart of
evolutionary novelty.
The rest of the chapter provocatively counters this notion
by drawing on West-Eberhard's elegant studies of wasps. Each
of these dazzling vignettes highlights behavioral flexibility and
developmental plasticity as intraspecific diversifying forces.
She cogently argues that the "switches" controlling the expression of "condition-sensitive traits" allow the dissociation
of complex sets of phenotypic alternatives across both ontogenetic and evolutionary time. Consequently, major evolutionary novelties can arise and be perpetuated within a species through "condition-sensitive" processes, and there is no
need to appeal to unknown sorts of genetic mechanisms to
account for major evolutionary transitions. As one of my
colleagues put it, "Imagine: no more slogging through adaptive valleys." The bottom line, one that begs to be explored
further, is that "condition-sensitive" processes do not merely
buffer the genotype against phenotypic and environmental
change, but provide the grist for all sorts of evolutionary
diversification.
Leo Buss and Matthew Dick present a picaresque and illuminating set of three bestiaries about worms, flies, and tunicates, each of which provocatively touches on the relationship between developmental processes and evolutionary
novelty and complexity. In contrast to the essay by WestEberhard, which examines the phenotypic origin of evolutionary novelty, the first two stories speculate on the genetic
basis of evolutionary novelty. Buss and Dick first tempt us
with a brief, but incisive, comparison of asexual propagation
in polychaetes (about which virtually nothing is known genetically) to the well-studied developmental genetics of segmentation in Drosophila. This was a jewel of a story-one
worth reading many times. It eloquently shows how developmental and molecular genetic studies, set in an imaginative
(and appropriate) comparative framework, can illuminate a
vast area of morphological mystery. They move on to pitch
saturation mutagenesis as a means to explore what is phenotypically "possible." I wish I had a clearer understanding
of the implications of "possible." My own view is that such
techniques may yield some information on what could evolve,
REVIEWS
July 1993
1605