Biography:

Amitabh Joshi obtained a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Botany (1986) and M.Sc. in Genetics (1988) from Delhi University, India, and a Ph.D. in Genetics (1993) from Washington State University, Pullman, working with John N. Thompson and Michael E. Moody on variation in the outcomes of coevolution among competing species of fruitflies. During this time, he also did theoretical work on the cost of sexual reproduction and the evolution of extreme ecological specialization. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Laurence D. Mueller at University of California, Irvine (1994-96), primarily on adaptation to larval and adult crowding in fruitflies. In 1996, he joined the faculty of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India, where he is presently Professor and Chairman of the Evolutionary and Organismal Biology Unit. His current research interests are in life-history evolution and small population and metapopulation dynamics, and he carries out a combination of experimental evolution studies with fruitflies, and theoretical work using computer simulations. He is particularly interested in the evolution of developmental rates and rates of ageing, the role of circadian clocks in timing life-history events, and in the interplay of local dynamics and migrations patterns/rates in affecting global metapopulation dynamics.

Abstract:

Developmental evolutionary biology: toward a fuller synthesis

In this 150th year since the publication of Darwins On the origin of species, it is worth taking stock of where evolutionary biology stands, especially in light of the developments in biology in the last sixty years or so. The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis of the mid-twentieth century was essentially a merger of Mendelian genetics (extended to populations) and the principle of natural selection, yielding a theoretical framework explaining the dynamics of adaptive change within populations. Embryology a field long tied up with attempts to understand mechanisms of evolution was largely absent from this synthesis. Now that molecular mechanisms of embryological development and inheritance are increasingly better understood, the contours of a newer synthesis bringing developmental biology back into the core of our understanding of evolutionary processes have begun to emerge. This new integrative field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), however, has had a somewhat lopsided progression, concentrating almost exclusively on understanding the evolution of developmental systems. I will use a few examples from my work on the laboratory evolution of rapid egg-to-adult in fruit flies to argue that a fuller synthesis of development and evolution also requires a focus on the developmental underpinnings of adaptive phenotypic change within populations, an approach I have termed developmental evolutionary biology (devo-evo).