A world of opportunity within constraint: Pere Alberch's early EvoDevo

The work of Pere Alberch is crucial to study the early stages of evo-devo. In particular, it illustrates very persuasively why developmental systems have so much to say about the course of evolutionary change. In addition to an important empirical work, he elaborated a stimulating framework of theoretical ideas on biological form, morphological variation, and how developmental processes establish possible evolutionary paths previous to the action of natural selection. In this framework, the study of development and evolution are related through the notion of possible morphologies. In his view, the morphology of organisms shows internal coherence and structure, emergent from complex non linear interactions among parts and with the environment.