Development developing

Abstract

Lala et al.’s (2024) Evolution Evolving is an excellent book. It offers a compelling case for the relevance of development to the study of evolution. It takes a pluralistic stance on the forms of understanding that development can offer, endorsing both structuralist and adaptationist insights, and gesturing to the links between them. It also succeeds in articulating some striking exemplars for how to link the study of development and evolution, in a way that may be able to overcome the limitations of some earlier approaches in the same vein. The critical sections of this review focus on the precise picture Lala et al. offer of how developmental processes contribute to the generation of novel adaptation, and also on their causal interactionist image of how selection and developmental are related.