Developmental Biology and Anthropology
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Developmental biology and developmental genetics are the basis of all human traits. Among the traits of central importance to anthropology are morphology, including the form and function of the skull and dentition. These are the traits most easily compared among species and essentially the only traits found in the fossil record. The head, and the brain it contains, are among the most important traits in primates generally and humans specifically. We are in an era when these traits and their evolutionary and genetic basis can be approached with a much more sophisticated way.
RESEARCH EMPHASES
Morphometrics is the intersection of biology and geometry, and consists of a group of methods used to study form and form change. The foundation of this discipline can be traced to the work of D'Arcy Thompson but the field has seen incredible growth in the 1980s and 1990s. The challenge is to design mathematical and statistical approaches that operate in such a way that the 'living' aspects of biological shapes are considered. Biologists require methods for correctly analyzing change over time due to growth or evolution, methods that are equally suited to subjects the size of molecules or elephants, methods that provide for the completion of partial specimens using available dsta, and methods for predicting, or 'retrodicting' in the case of paleontology, the geometry of hypothetical forms based on evolutionary, ecological, functional and/or developmental considerations. Morphometrics is being used routinely in biological anthropology to analyze change in three dimensional form.
If morphometrics gives us the ability to evaluate the trait, genetics provides an understanding of how it is produced in the embryo and how it evolved in primates (and mammals generally). One of the most exciting applications of morphometric methods is in the construction of genotype-phenotype correlations. Mapping morphological changes, be they subtle or overt, to changes at the molecular level.
Our research concerns the signaling processes by which craniofacial and dental patterning traits are produced, and the way in which those signals end up laying down the mineralized material of these structures. But these cannot be studied without also studying the neural development that shapes and develops with them—that is, the brain. Our research includes both normal development and with some models of human craniofacial developmental disease. We use animal models, both mouse and baboon (and, sometimes, other vertebrates, even fish) to understand these phenomena.
DEPARTMENT DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGISTS
- Anne Buchanan, Research Associate in Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society
- George Chaplin, Senior Research Associate, Shape analysis, allometry
- Nina Jablonski, Primates, Human variation, Primate Allometry, Life History
- George Milner, Professor, Missisissippian and Southeastern N. American chiefdoms
- Joan Richtsmeier, Professor, Cranofacial morphometrics, development, and diseases,
primate evolution - Mark Shriver, Associate Professor, Genetics of human ancestry, genetics of normal
human variation, admixture methods for finding disease genes - Alan Walker, Professor, Paleoanthropology, comparative vertebrate evolution, primatology
- Kenneth Weiss, Evan Pugh Professor of Biological Anthropology and Genetics and Science, Technology, and Society
