Heterochrony in Evolution: A Multidisciplinary Approach

✍ Scribed by Stephen Jay Gould (auth.), Michael L. McKinney (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 353
• Series: Topics in Geobiology 7
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

... an adult poet is simply an individual in a state of arrested development-in brief, a sort of moron. Just as all of us, in utero, pass through a stage in which we are tadpoles, ... so all of us pass through a state, in our nonage, when we are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply a donkey: his development has been arrested even anterior to that of the tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something he isn't-something far younger and juicier than he actually is. -H. 1. Mencken, High and Ghostly Matters, Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924) Where would evolution be, Without this thing, heterochrony? -M. L. McKinney (1987) One of the joys of working in a renascent field is that it is actually possible to keep up with the literature. So it is with mixed emotions that we heterochronists (even larval forms like myself) view the recent "veritable explosion of interest in heterochrony" (in Gould's words in this volume). On the positive side, it is ob­ viously necessary and desirable to extend and expand the inquiry; but one regrets that already we are beginning to talk past, lose track of, and even ignore each other as we carve out individual interests.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xvii
The Uses of Heterochrony....Pages 1-13
Front Matter....Pages 15-15
Classifying Heterochrony....Pages 17-34
Multivariate Analysis....Pages 35-51
Shape Analysis....Pages 53-69
Phylogenetic Analysis and the Detection of Ontogenetic Patterns....Pages 71-91
Sclerochronology and the Size versus Age Problem....Pages 93-108
Front Matter....Pages 109-109
Heterochrony in Plants....Pages 111-133
Heterochrony in Colonial Marine Animals....Pages 135-158
Heterochrony in Ammonites....Pages 159-182
Heterochrony in Gastropods....Pages 183-196
Heterochrony in Gastropods....Pages 197-216
Heterochrony in Rodents....Pages 217-235
Heterochrony in Primates....Pages 237-266
Front Matter....Pages 267-267
Genetic Basis for Heterochronic Variation....Pages 269-285
The Abundance of Heterochrony in the Fossil Record....Pages 287-325
Heterochrony in Evolution....Pages 327-340
Back Matter....Pages 341-348

✦ Subjects

Developmental Biology; Evolutionary Biology; Archaeology