Abstract
This chapter argues that historical and philosophical studies of David Wake’s 50-year investigation of the salamanders (Order Caudata) reveal a sustained effort to demonstrate the continuing value of taxon-centered research as opposed to or distinct from model organism research. Wake is an evolutionary morphologist involved in the emergence of Evo-devo and co-organizer of the 1981 Dahlem conference on Evolution and Development. He developed a distinctive practice of extrapolating “lessons” as well as results from his taxon-focused research on salamanders. Some of Wake’s contributions to the emergence and conceptual development of Evo-devo are characterized in terms of lessons learned from his use of the salamanders as a “model taxon.” Model taxa are intended to be monophyletic clades in which the whole clade constitutes the model, in contrast to model or experimental organisms, which are species used as models.
Isolated cases lack the impact that arises when one must confront the often conflicting lines of evidence that arise from a long-term focus on the evolution of a diverse monophyletic taxon (Wake 1991 , 544).
Taxon-based research in evolution permits…a multidimensional approach…with lessons learned from research on salamanders. The clade is widespread and diverse, yet sufficiently small that one can keep all of the species in mind. This facilitates research from diverse perspectives… (Wake 2009 , 333).
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Notes
- 1.
There is a terminological obstacle to discussing conceptual change in scientific “problems.” A problem can be something that poses a methodological or inferential difficulty or roadblock to the conduct of research. But a problem is also routinely described as a research or pedagogical question to be answered. Much of the philosophical and historical literature on scientific practice uses the term ‘problem’ to mean the latter—a research problem to be solved (e.g., Kuhn 1970; Laudan 1977). Wake et al. (2011) talk about “problems” in the former sense of methodological or inferential difficulty and use “question” to mean the latter sense. Here, I will use the term ‘difficulty’ to mean a “problem” of the former sort and use ‘problem’ to mean a research question.
- 2.
Comparative morphology extends back as far as the ancient Greeks, but comparative methods and problems prior to the mid-nineteenth century are far beyond the scope of this essay.
- 3.
In the case of salamanders, however, the diversity is ecological-functional despite a rather broadly “generalized” vertebrate morphology. Indeed, there are few morphological characters to distinguish subclades due to rampant homoplasy (Wake 1993).
- 4.
See Gerson (2007) on the role of developments in research technology in the emergence of Evo-devo.
- 5.
I was an undergraduate student in genetics at Berkeley (1973–1977). I took Wake’s evolution course in 1975 or 1976 and an independent study course with Wake on Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny in 1977 to fulfill a requirement in biological diversity. Wake’s student, James Hanken, was my TA. Lewontin’s book was required reading, Alan Wilson (my biochemistry teacher) was making a splash with his innovative studies of rates of evolution, and Pere Alberch, my classmate in embryology, was becoming an innovator in thinking about evolution and development. I arrived at Chicago as a graduate student after Lewontin had left (I got his office on the 4th floor in the Zoology building), but the electrophoresis and phylogenetics revolutions were still fresh in Lynn Throckmorton’s teaching.
- 6.
In biology, these were taxon-based disciplines (zoology, botany) with taxon-based specialties (mammalogy, malacology, protozoology, phytology, or pteridology); see Gerson (1998). One scientist’s problem is another scientist’s tool, so the distinction cannot be all that sharp.
- 7.
“Periodization” is a way of describing how embryologists model developmental processes by dividing them into stages in order to express a narrative structure in terms of hypotheses of developmental fate susceptible to empirical testing (Griesemer 1996). Here, I apply similar reasoning in discussing conceptual development of the histories of biological specialties.
- 8.
Shubin was a Miller post-doc at Berkeley and worked closely there with Wake. Shubin had been a graduate student at Harvard, where he worked closely with Pere Alberch, one of Wake’s students.
- 9.
As benchmark, note that the TCIP/IP internet protocol and GenBank both launched in 1982.
- 10.
Not that molecular evolution per se was uninteresting, but it is not especially germane to Wake’s story or to the role of evolutionary morphology in Evo-devo other than by adding yet another contrast between selection and alternative evolutionary mechanisms (drift).
- 11.
It is important to emphasize that while I focus on David Wake, many colleagues, collaborators, post-docs, and students have been involved, including: Jessica Bolker (New Hampshire and Shoals Marine Laboratory), Allan Larson (Washington University), Neil Shubin (University of Chicago), Stephen Stearns (Yale), Gerhard Roth (Bremen), and Marvalee Wake (Emerita Professor of Integrative Biology, Berkeley), among others. Space does not permit a wider report on the spread of Wake’s “salamander platform” to other investigators or research organizations.
- 12.
See also Bolker (2009) for a distinction between exemplars and surrogates.
- 13.
Contingent distributions over all life on Earth would turn out to be fundamental if those patterns would appear again if “life’s tape” were rewound and replayed (see Gould 1989).
- 14.
This distinction is similar to the one made by Gerson (2007) between part-whole and instance-kind relations. Gerson argues that there was a general shift in twentieth century biology from the former to the latter, and that this helps explain why certain specialties were excluded from the evolutionary synthesis, which emerged as an instance-kind sort of field, and why specialties that formed the Evo-devo juncture were all or mostly part-whole specialties. See also Winther (2006) on “compositional” biology.
- 15.
Here I am using “problem” in yet a third way (cf. footnote 1). ‘Problem’ here refers to some environmental “challenge” “solved” by organisms. This is the sense of the term ‘problem’ that Lewontin (1978) and Gould and Lewontin (1979) found fault with in their critique of adaptationism. Organisms or species do not “solve” “problems” “posed” by “the environment,” according to their critique. It would take me too far afield to address this criticism by constructing a fully adequate set of terms to talk about “problems.” So, I commit their adaptationist fallacy on this occasion for the sake of convenience.
- 16.
Wake’s publication list up to 2012 has been extremely useful as an aid to building my narrative (Wake n.d.). Given the immensity of Wake’s oeuvre, I can only sample a few representative works and must ignore his work on a variety of interrelated topics, such as global biodiversity.
- 17.
This is not intended as a complete list of significant packages of phenomena developed in the Wake Lab, but only a description of some that were particularly relevant to Evo-devo work.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Alan Love for organizing the workshop, incredible patience and care in reading the manuscript, and many suggestions that greatly improved the paper and its argument. Thanks also to the other workshop participants, especially David Wake and James Hanken, for helpful discussion. I thank Elihu Gerson for comments on the manuscript, discussion and support. Thanks to the California Academy of Sciences History and Philosophy of Biology Discussion Group for providing a willing audience and the UC Davis Herbert A. Young Society Dean’s Fellowship (2011–2014) and NSF grant SES-0823401 for support.
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Griesemer, J.R. (2015). What Salamander Biologists Have Taught Us About Evo-devo. In: Love, A. (eds) Conceptual Change in Biology. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 307. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9412-1_13
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