'Before Genetic Programs There Were DPMs'

From Stuart Newman's "High Tea" :

 

While some scientists prefer shaping their opinions about evolution based on audience reaction while on book tour – others are actually busy looking for answers in the lab. Stuart Newman, Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at New York Medical College, is the real deal.

 

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Charles Darwin's theory was last updated 70 years ago. "Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" is the working title of the new one.

 

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On Tuesday, March 25, Newman spoke at the University of Notre Dame's Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Biocomplexity Newman states that "in contrast to the Neo-Darwinian principle . . phenotypic disparity early in evolution occurred in advance of, rather than closely tracked, genotypic change."

Here's the abstract from Newman's Notre Dame "high tea"
University of Notre Dame/Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Biocomplexity/Center News:

"The shapes and forms of multicellular organisms arise by generation of new cell states and types and changes in the numbers and rearrangements of the various kinds of cells. This talk will consider the role played by a core set of "dynamic patterning modules" (DPMs) in the origination, development and evolution of complex organisms. DPMs consist of the gene products of what is known as the "developmental-genetic toolkit," but considered in subsets, as dynamical networks embodying physical processes characteristic of chemically and mechanically excitable meso- to macroscopic systems like cell aggregates: cohesion, viscoelasticity, diffusion, and spatio-temporal heterogeneity based on lateral inhibition, and multistable and oscillatory dynamics.

I will focus on the emergence of the multicellular animals (metazoa), and show how the toolkit gene products and pathways that pre-existed this form of life acquired novel morphogenetic functions simply by virtue of the change in scale and context inherent to multicellularity. We show that DPMs, acting singly and in combination with each other, constitute a "pattern language" capable of generating all metazoan body plans and organ forms.

This concept implies that the multicellular organisms of the late Precambrian–early Cambrian were phenotypically highly plastic, fluently exploring morphospace in a fashion decoupled from both genotypic change and adaptation. The stable developmental trajectories and morphological phenotypes of modern animals, then, are considered to be products of stabilizing selection. This perspective provides a solution to the apparent "molecular homology-analogy paradox," whereby divergent modern animal types utilize the same molecular toolkit during development by proposing, in contrast to the Neo-Darwinian principle, that phenotypic disparity early in evolution occurred in advance of, rather than closely tracked, genotypic change."