Evolutionary developmental biology (evo–devo) has its origins in comparative embryology, but it was more recent advances in developmental genetics that really defined the field. Evo–devo attempts to integrate an understanding of developmental processes into the Modern Synthesis of genetics and evolution, which classically only looked at how allele frequencies changed in populations. This Focus issue of Nature Reviews Genetics examines some of the conceptual advances that evo–devo is offering to evolutionary biology as a whole, and looks at how both new approaches such as genomics and classical approaches such as palaeontology are supporting these advances.

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