The developmental basis of evolutionary change.

It is a hard-won insight that developmental change is essential to evolution, and the issue has received little consideration in the psychological literature. The origin of the concept can be traced to the nineteenth century biologist St. George Mivart, with the more systematic and extensive treatments of the issue in the early twentieth century by Walter Garstang, Gavin de Beer, and Richard Goldschmidt playing an instrumental role in fleshing out the idea and keeping it alive. Garstang and de Beer held that genetic change, either through selective breeding or mutation, could change the timing of ontogenetic events in various defined ways to give rise to a new species. Goldschmidt felt that a developmental macromutation was necessary to produce a genuine evolutionary novelty. In the view of Garstang, de Beer, and Goldschmidt, a genetic change or mutation is necessary to bring about the developmental changes that lead to evolution. In the present article I utilize the developmental change concept in a different manner than the aforementioned writers. In essence, I describe a different evolutionary pathway, one in which developmental changes in behavior lead to evolutionary change. On this view, genetic change is a secondary or tertiary consequence of enduring behavioral changes brought about by nongenetic alterations of species-typical development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)