Links between Evolutionary Developmental Pathology, Anatomy, Systems biology, Epigenetics, and Behavior: a unifying view of life and evolution

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Ниже представлена краткая аннотация предстоящей лекции (лекция будет проведена на английском языке).

Links between Evolutionary Developmental Pathology, Anatomy, Systems biology, Epigenetics, and Behavior: a unifying view of life and evolution

Since the rise of Evo-Devo in the 1980s few authors have attempted to combine the increasing knowledge obtained from the study of model organisms and human medicine with data from comparative and evolutionary biology in order to investigate the links between development, pathology and macroevolution. Fortunately, this situation is slowly changing, with a renewed interest in Evolutionary Developmental Pathology (Evo-Devo-Path) in the last decades . However, this interest and the new data obtained from it, as well as their main implications for evolution and medicine, have not been the object of a synthesis to the broader scientific community and wider public. In this talk I will thus provide such a synthesis. Specifically, I will provide a brief historical account on the study of the links between evolution, development and pathologies, followed by case studies from the recent work done by me and other colleagues on subjects related to Evo-Devo-Path (evolution-development-pathology), and then by a general discussion on the broader anatomical, developmental and macroevolutionary implications of these case studies, including the links between the phenotype and the genotype, within both normal and abnormal development.

In the second part of the talk I will connect these issues with current discussions on the need for a revised theory of evolution, or Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, particularly focusing on my last book, Evolution Driven by Organismal Behavior . It is in fact a puzzling paradox that eco-morphological mismatches occur so frequently in an evolutionary process that often leads to macroevolutionary trends and in which organisms are said to be 'designed' for the habitats they inhabit. Here I will present a new framework - Organic Nonoptimal Constrained Evolution (ONCE) - to address this paradox, and to explain why organisms look as they look: organisms themselves, and in particular their behavior, are the major active players of evolution. That is, within this framework, internal factors can both decrease and increase plasticity/hidden variation and therefore, together with epigenetic factors influenced by the external environment, can allows organisms to shift their behavior, for instance as a response to environmental changes. Importantly, due to behavioral persistence related to behavioral/ecological inheritance, organisms as diverse as bacteria, plants and animals help to construct their own niches, thus being crucial to direct evolution. Darwinian natural (external) selection then comes into play as a secondary - but still crucial - player. That is, due to organismal behavioral persistence, the random mutations/epigenetic factors that happen to be advantageous within the niches constructed by the organisms will be selected, further directing evolution and increasing the match between behavior, phenotype, and environment. This process can extend for long periods of time, leading to macroevolutionary morphological trends and further increasing this match, potentially resulting in successful phenotypic overspecialization. However, behavioral persistence, loss of plasticity due to natural selection, genetic drift, overspecialization, and internal constraints can often make it difficult for the organisms to respond behaviorally and/or anatomically to new environmental changes, resulting in potential mismatches between behavior, ecology and form, and eventually in extinction, and this may unfortunately apply to human evolution.