Evo-Devo: From Geoffrey St. Hilaire to Hox Genes

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom
by Sean B. Carroll

From Geoffrey St. Hilaire to hox genes. , April 17, 2005

This is a fascinating book, very much worth reading, but I knocked off one star for the outrageous way in which the history of biology is distorted, whether deliberately or because of the misleading if not mendacious histories of biology that disgrace the subject and confuse even specialists and authors. Looking at the index one finds no reference to the developmentalists, such as Geoffrey St. Hilaire or Von Baer. Darwin meanwhile is made over into a precursor!! It is not nice that the history is this outrageous, one must conclude that modern biology, certainly its history, is a subject without integrity. Surely the history of biology shows that the embryologists in the first half of the nineteenth century anticipated modern breakthroughs of the last generation, but that Darwin and the Darwinists clipped this early research with their incorrect and limited microevolutionary obsession with natural selection. Many critics of Darwin, including many of his first reviewers, could not accept Darwin's thesis because they were aware of the implications of embryology. Even Huxley we forget supported Darwin but demurred on his mechanism because he was aware of the discrepancies. Obviously the paradigm has to get fixed without anyone being the wiser, and Darwin has to remain the icon here, and to sell books the subject has to be fixed. Beyond that, and the book would have been better simply presenting the basics of the new developmental genetics, this is a compelling read and a good fast intro to the new world of the remarkable hox genes and their implications for biology. Since Darwin did _not_ know of all this and assumed that natural selection would do the job of hox genes, any reasonable presentation ought to point out that Darwin was wrong and that we are moving in a new direction. Further, now that we see so much developmental structure we should suspect that something more is involved in macroevolution than natural selection. We should at least demand some better proof. In any case, read skeptically this is a fascinating book, but let's hope we don't get railroaded into a new phoney synthesis here. It is worth reading Soren Lovtrup's _Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth_ to get from the old embryological underground the real history of biology in relation to developmental issues.
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