Alan C. Love, "Evolution and Development: Conceptual Issues" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Alan Love, professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His new book, Evolution and Development Conceptual Issues, is just out from Cambridge University Press. It was an astounding discovery in the 1980s that the same genetic sequence, the homeobox, controlled the development of basic body plans across the animal kingdom.
whether the result was a flatworm, an octopus, a mouse, or of course a human. This discovery of the conservation of a key developmental mechanism across phyla and vast stretches of evolutionary time helped launch the interdisciplinary field of evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo. In his new book, Love explains and explores evo-devo and the philosophical problems that arise in its pursuit. He considers such issues as the type of scientific unity that arises from focusing on problem agendas rather than on theory, the problem of determining when variation in traits gives rise to a novel trait, and how the identity of features at various levels of biological organization can be explained by particular causal mechanisms.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Alan Love. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thanks. Glad to be here.
um so this is a very cool book very slim but packed with lots of philosophical uh questions about evo devo evolution and development um uh so before we get into the the book itself uh let's uh get a bit about you what you know how did you get into philosophy and and how did you come to write this book
Sure. Well, so in coming into philosophy, I actually started as a biology major and was focused on molecular laboratory genetics, but found myself interested in kind of minoring in something else and tried music, which I had an interest in that that didn't work out and then opted to try a philosophy major. And believe it or not, I took that philosophy major in the junior and senior year. So not having taken any classes before that, but I did not take any philosophy of science classes because they weren't offered. And so my interest in philosophy was almost completely parallel to my interest in science. And it was only after that that the two kind of merged through some reading of my own and some opportunities to talk with people.
And then that pulled me back into the orbit of graduate school. And I ended up in the history and philosophy of science department at the University of Pittsburgh. In many ways, the book is a natural outgrowth of work I've been doing for the last two decades since I finished my dissertation. I've been interested in the intersection of evolution and development and evo-devo in particular as a field.
What is Evo‑Devo and why did the homeobox discovery launch the field?
different philosophical issues that are found within that context. And I was working on them in my dissertation. I've been working on them ever since. And the book kind of represents a synthesis of some of the key analyses and ideas that I've developed in thinking about these things for quite some time.
Excellent. So, yeah, evolution and development, conceptual issues. What is evolution and development for for those who are not, you know, all that up on. this particular aspect of biology. What is evo-devo? What are the concepts there? And there's sort of two directions. There's the evolution of development and the role of development in evolution. So it sort of goes both ways. Can you explain the field kind of?
Yeah, perhaps the most natural entry point is difference in timescale. Development typically refers to those events that are occurring within a single generation. We oftentimes associate it with embryogenesis and the formation of standard features during gestation.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:08
2
What is Evo‑Devo and why did the homeobox discovery launch the field?
4:08–10:11
3
How did Alan Love’s career path lead him to study philosophy of Evo‑Devo?
10:11–16:47
4
What are the two main directions in Evo‑Devo: evolution of development vs. developmental basis of evolution?
16:47–26:27
5
Why is the interdisciplinary nature of Evo‑Devo philosophically challenging?
26:27–36:56
6
How does the concept of ‘conservation’ (e.g., homeobox genes) raise philosophical questions?
36:56–49:01
7
What are character‑identity mechanisms and how do they address the problem of novelty?
49:01–59:38
8
How do developmental constraints shape evolvability, illustrated by vertebral number in mammals?
59:38–1:01:30
Speakers
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