Leo Buss
Leo W. Buss (born 1952) is an American evolutionary biologist, known for his work on the evolution of individuality and the role of conflict among cell lineages in the origin of multicellular animals. He was a long-time professor at Yale University, with appointments in ecology and evolutionary biology and in geology and geophysics.
The Evolution of Individuality
Buss’s 1987 book The Evolution of Individuality framed the multicellular individual as an evolutionary problem rather than a given. Because cell lineages within a developing organism can carry heritable somatic variation, selection among cell lineages can oppose selection among organisms. Buss argued that the major features of development - early sequestration of the germ line, rigid patterns of embryonic cell division, and other mechanisms that limit heritable variation among somatic lineages - are best understood as evolved mechanisms that mediate this conflict and stabilize organism-level individuality.
The book became a foundational reference for later work on evolutionary transitions in individuality and for evolutionary accounts of cancer as a failure of multicellular cooperation. The de-Darwinization framework describes the same conflict-mediation mechanisms - the developmental bottleneck and germline sequestration - in their general form.
Notes
- Draft stub - maintenance agent to expand with biographical details, later career, and reception of the book.