In an interview with Hari Sridhar for the Reflections on Papers Past project, Gerd Müller shares the backstory of his well-known 2007 paper "Evo-devo: extending the evolutionary synthesis" published in Nature Review Genetics. The paper, written about 25 years after the field emerged, surveys evo-devo's research agendas and theoretical impulses at the time, and explores the implications of evo-devo findings for evolutionary theory. In the years following its publication, it served as a kind of trigger for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, which developed over the next decade

 

In the interview, Müller talks about the origins of his interest in evo-devo, the specific circumstances that led to him writing  this paper, and the community of peers and collaborators who shaped his thinking on the topic. The interview also serves as an opportunity for Müller to reflect on the fate of the paper and its ideas after it was published, including how his own thinking on the paper's themes has evolved over time.

 

This interview forms part of the Reflections on Papers Past project, which collects backstories of and reflections on well-known and influential papers in the fields of Ecology and Evolution, through interviews with their authors.

 

A brief excerpt from the interview:

HS: Gerd, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. I’d like to start by talking about the paper’s motivation and the work that it describes. From looking at your publication list on Google Scholar, it is clear that many of the themes and ideas that are in this paper were already of interest to you for a long time before. What motivated you to bring them all together in this paper in 2007?

GM: Indeed, this was not the first contribution I had written on this subject. The paper was based on a series of previous publications, the earliest of which goes back to 1994, when I wrote an article on a new synthesis between evolutionary and developmental biology – the field wasn’t called evo-devo yet. This was published in a book by Wolfgang Wieser, in German, on the evolution of evolutionary theory, which also had articles by Peter Schuster, Rupert Riedl, and others. That, I think, was the very first time I tried to formulate the ideas I had on this subject. Subsequently, there were other papers in English. There was also a book I co-edited with Brian Hall called ‘Towards the New Synthesis’ in its subtitle, which was on early eco-evo-devo. And I had an article on evo-devo in a handbook edited by Francisco Ayala and Franz Wuketits, in 2005, who, by the way, had been an early scientific manager here at the KLI. But, you know, writings in German are rarely read by an Anglo-American audience, and the ones in English were not published in prominent places. Therefore, I thought that the Nature paper was a great opportunity to bring these ideas together...

 

Interview: Revisiting Müller 2007

Date and place of interview: 24 July 2024; Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI), Klosterneuburg, Austria.

Credits: Hari Sridhar (background research, planning and conducting interview); Joyshree Chanam (background research, planning and editing of interview)