The Integration Between Functional and Evolutionary Biology and the Promise of EvoDevo

FOLGUERA, G.; LAVAGNINO, N. J.

Helsinki

Conferencia; The Fourth Conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association; 2013

European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA)

Since its proposal by Mayr, the distinction between functional and evolutionary biology occupies an important place in Biology. However, different researchers have noted several problems associated with the use of this distinction. EvoDevo (evolutionary developmental biology) emerged as one of the areas of knowledge that finds this distinction problematic and is proposed as being able to accomplish an integration between functional and evolutionary biology. However, it is not obvious that EvoDevo as an area of knowledge really achieves this integration and it is even less clear how it would do so. To deal with these questions our research analyses whether EvoDevo?s mechanisms accomplish functional and/or evolutionary roles by means of elucidating if they are involved in proximate and/or ultimate causes of biological phenomena. Our proposal is that one of the possible strategies to tackle this problem is to consider mechanisms that generate biological variability as examples of proximate causation and mechanisms that only modify variability as examples of ultimate causation. Then, the main question in our analysis is: do EvoDevo?s mechanisms have a function of generators and/or modifiers of biological variability? In particular, we focus on three of the main EvoDevo mechanisms: environmental induction, hypervariability/somatic selection and developmental bias. Our analysis shows a different characterization in terms of the causalities in which each one of the mechanisms analyzed are involved. Then, since there are not uniform results in terms of causation of EvoDevo mechanisms it?s not trivial how EvoDevo would build a bridge between functional and evolutionary biology.