Although only about four decades old, Evolutionary Developmental Biology (“evo-devo” for short) has already made fundamental contributions to a wide variety of areas in biology, and today has all the markings of an established discipline. At the same time, evo-devo’s highly interdisciplinary nature and its community of practitioners drawn from diverse disciplinary backgrounds means that the question “What is evo-devo?” doesn’t have a singular answer. It contains a variety of research programmes, each with its own style of functioning, paradigms, model systems and culture of scientific practice.

This project is intended as a contribution to the contemporary history of evo-devo, guided by the broad question, “From its beginning, roughly 40 years ago, how did evo-devo get to where it is today, in terms of its concepts, questions, approaches, study systems and empirical and theoretical understanding?” Given the contrasting nature of evo-devo - being a recognized scientific discipline, but consisting of a diversity of independent research agendas – I believe that such a history will be valuable in itself as well as for practicing evo-devo biologists to better understand how the discipline got to where it is today, in terms of its priorities, approaches and understandings gained.

Historical research on evo-devo, till date, has mainly focused on understanding the intellectual antecedents of evo-devo and, to a lesser extent, examining the history of ideas in the discipline based primarily on published scientific papers. To my knowledge, there has been little attention paid to the history of contemporary scientific practice, along with its ideas, in evo-devo. In this project, I hope to address this gap by conducting a series of oral histories around foundational papers in evo-devo, using an approach I’ve developed and used extensively in an earlier oral history project in Ecology and Evolution (https://reflectionsonpaperspast.com/).