Abstract

Ideas and insights of Darwin, Mendel, and their contemporaries culminated in the Modern Synthesis (MS) that can be said to have caused a great upheaval in the minds of men. However, the extra-scientific role that the MS was set to play against the viewpoint of creationism turned it into a frozen dogma. It did not recognize the inherent complexity of the process of biological evolution, which is essentially linked with that of organismic development. The subsequent emergence of the viewpoint of 'evo-devo', that led to what has been referred to as an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) was initially not recognized as a viable extension of the MS, mainly because it did not yet have a molecular basis. A vastly extended scenario was, however, opened up on the basis of ideas relating to gene regulation and networks of regulatory elements distributed throughout the genome, where these play an essential role in development. Notably, the genome as a whole, with its networks of regulatory elements, is heritable and gets altered across generations by means of mutations, just like the genes within its folds. This leads to the fundamental idea that biological evolution is a consequence of the modification of the developmental process across generations, where the entire genome passes through a complex progression of structural and functional alterations on a time scale large compared to that of organismic development. The resulting theory of regulatory evolution (TRE) is truly a remarkable extension of the MS. In this essay we examine the emergence of the TRE from within the womb of the MS in the light of a number of fundamental aspects of the evolutionary dynamics of complex systems.