Diogo Rui
Department of Anatomy, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, District of Columbia.
J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol. 2018 Jan;330(1):15-22. doi: 10.1002/jez.b.22791. Epub 2018 Feb 2.
After the inaugural Pan-American-Evo-Devo meeting (2015, Berkeley), I showed how major concerns about evo-devo (Evolutionary Developmental Biology) research were demonstrated by a simple, non-biased quantitative analysis of the titles/abstracts of that meeting's talks. Here, I apply the same methodology to the titles/abstracts of the recent Pan-American-Evo-Devo meeting (2017, Calgary). The aim is to evaluate if the concerns raised by me in that paper and by other authors have been addressed and/or if there are other types of differences between the two meetings that may reflect trends within the field of evo-devo. This analysis shows that the proportion of presentations referring to "morphology", "organism", "selection", "adaptive", "phylogeny", and their derivatives was higher in the 2017 meeting, which therefore had a more "organismal" feel. However, there was a decrease in the use of "evolution"/its derivatives and of macroevolutionary terms related to the tempo and mode of evolution in the 2017 meeting. Moreover, the disproportionately high use of genetic/genomic terms clearly shows that evo-devo continues to be mainly focused on devo, and particularly on "Geno", that is, on molecular/genetic studies. Furthermore, the vast majority of animal evo-devo studies are focused only on hard tissues, which are just a small fraction of the whole organism-for example, only 15% of the tissue mass of the human body. The lack of an integrative approach is also evidenced by the lack of studies addressing conceptual/long-standing broader questions, including the links between ecology and particularly behavior and developmental/evolutionary variability and between evo-devo and evolutionary medicine.
在首届泛美进化发育生物学会议(2015年,伯克利)之后,我展示了如何通过对该会议演讲的标题/摘要进行简单、无偏见的定量分析,来揭示进化发育生物学(evo-devo)研究中的主要问题。在此,我将相同的方法应用于最近的泛美进化发育生物学会议(2017年,卡尔加里)的标题/摘要。目的是评估我在那篇论文中提出的问题以及其他作者提出的问题是否得到了解决,和/或这两次会议之间是否存在其他类型的差异,这些差异可能反映了进化发育生物学领域的趋势。该分析表明,在2017年的会议上,提及“形态学”“生物体”“选择”“适应性”“系统发育”及其衍生词的报告比例更高,因此该会议更具“生物体”的感觉。然而,在2017年的会议上,“进化”及其衍生词以及与进化速度和模式相关的宏观进化术语的使用有所减少。此外,遗传/基因组术语的使用比例过高,清楚地表明进化发育生物学仍然主要侧重于发育,特别是“基因”方面,即分子/遗传研究。此外,绝大多数动物进化发育生物学研究仅关注硬组织,而硬组织只是整个生物体的一小部分——例如,仅占人体组织质量的15%。缺乏综合方法还体现在缺乏解决概念性/长期存在的更广泛问题的研究,包括生态学与特别是行为以及发育/进化变异性之间的联系,以及进化发育生物学与进化医学之间的联系。