This page indexes transcripts from a workshop held September 5-8, 1997 at Friday Harbor Laboratories, entitled Modularity of Animal Form: Beyond Homology and Analogy. The purpose of this workshop was to bring together in a critical forum the presumptive authors of a planned book on this topic. While the book project was ultimately abandoned because the organizers needed to do other things (like do some science and graduate instead of write books), the workshop was nevertheless considered a success by all participants. Among other things we all learned a lot about how each other was coming around to the same sorts of problems at the intersection of evolutionary and developmental biology. These transcripts, made by George von Dassow from video tapes of the workshop sessions, should be considered pre-publication materials, and while they are freely available for all to view, none should be circulated, linked to, or disseminated in any way without express permission. For historical context you might be interested in the original workshop announcement that brought these people together.
Session 1: Jason Hodin -- the nature of developmental constraints and macroevolution
Session 3: Richard Burian -- working heuristics in science
Session 4: Günter Wagner -- the problem of character identity; developmental constraints as interface between development and evolution
Session 7: William Wimsatt -- emergence as non-aggregativity; the problem of decomposition and some pragmatic approaches
Session 10: Lisa Nagy -- opportunities and pitfalls in comparative studies of molecular developmental mechanisms; examples from the Arthropods
Session 11: Jessica Bolker -- modularity in morphogenesis; vertebrate gastrulation as a case study
More transcripts may appear if I ever have the time... I don't think these have yet become dated in the least. I often return to them and find them surprisingly fresh. These six that are presented here were partly just the first ones I got to in the pile, but also featured (as I remembered) the liveliest discussions. I find these valuable documents because they expose the extent to which people coming from different perspectives often need to get straight both what they are talking about and why they think it's important. Sometimes both are a bit of a surprise to someone from another field. Also, this meeting was remarkable in the degree to which the participants actually accomplished this communications task.
- George von Dassow, 1/9/00
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