What is Evo Devo? What is Evo Devo Art?
Anna uses the developmental and evolutionary stories emerging in the biology field of Evo Devo as content for her music compositions and multimedia works. Using animation, lecture, video, and music, she probes the mysterious biological processes behind the diverse, complex, and beautiful biological world to create Evo Devo Art.Evo Devo (Evolutionary Developmental Biology or Evolution of Development) is a field which examines developmental biology processes and how these processes have evolved through time. This emerging field brings together molecular biology, developmental biology, genetics, and paleontology to answer questions like:
- How do cell identities get defined? What genetic mechanisms are at work to specify what body parts develop at specific locations and times during development?
- How do developmental mechanisms get reused in different developmental contexts? A whole interconnected network of genes might be reused multiple times to give rise to repeated structures like human ribs or centipede legs, or a single gene network might be important in the development of less obviously related structures like a wing and an antenna.
- How do developmental mechanisms get reused through evolutionary time? What are the similarities in developmental processes between very old organisms like insects and more recently evolved organisms like mammals?
- How do novel structures like feathers or butterfly eyespots originate? What are the modifications, duplications, and changes in regulation to old developmental processes that have made the development of novel structures possible?
- Why have there been periods in evolutionary history marked by explosions in novel body structures and other periods of evolutionary history with minimal modifications to organismal forms?
- How do development and evolution each constrain and influence the other? How does the evolutionary history of an organism limit the possibility for potential changes to the developmental processes of that organism? How do environmental forces that are essential in providing selection pressures that guide evolution affect developmental processes within an individual organism?
In the mid to late 19th century the study of development became integrated with the study of evolution with the notion that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” that both evolution (phylogeny) and development (ontogeny) have a branching, tree-like structure. The great diversity of organisms present on the earth today—the tips of the tree of life—can ultimately be traced to a common ancestor—the "tree trunk." Similarly, varied adult organismal forms—the tips of the tree—all develop from quite similar egg and embryonic states—again a sort of tree trunk. While this concept of the parallels between development and evolution has since been debunked, this was the beginning of understanding the interaction between development and evolution.
The study of development and the study of evolution diverged as disciplines during the first part of the 20th century. Not until the 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of comparative data of molecular bases of development in different species, were evolution and development studied and understood together again. Now Evo Devo represents a field probing some of the most interesting queries of how the biological world works.