Heredity and Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

Heredity is a central concept in biology and one of the core principles needed for adaptive evolution. For most of the past 100 years, heredity has been defined and conceptualized in terms of transmission of genes. This is heuristically useful but imposes a certain structure on evolutionary theory and leaves out aspects of heredity that may be important to understand evolution. Emerging developmental perspectives on evolution suggests that alternative ways to represent heredity may prove useful. To this end, this chapter explains how evolutionary biologists treat heredity, conceptually and mathematically. It argues that treating heredity as an outcome of developmental processes not only makes it clearer how different mechanisms of inheritance contribute to evolution but also shows that inheritance cannot be treated as a static channel of transmission of information because it evolves as part of the process of adaptation.