The (Modest) Triumph of the Embryo

The talk explores the historical relationships that exist between the development and the evolution of embryos. What is the link between our developmental origin as individuals (a fertilized egg), on the one hand, and our evolutionary origin as a group of individuals (an ancestral population), on the other hand? And these embryos, are they really extraordinary constructions relying on carefully accumulated, multiple sets of precisely encoded instructions or instead, could they be the mere and only obligatory result of a chaotic program haphazardly built during the past hundreds million years? Speaker Denis Duboule, Professor of Genetics and Chair of Evolution of Development and Genomes, Collège de France, Paris Organized by Claude Desplan, Silver Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, Department of Biology, NYU