American precursors of evo-devo: ecology, cell lineage, and pastimes unworthy of the Deity.

The American precursors of evo-devo have numerous phenotypes. Fritz Müller, a German émigré living in Brazil, was one of the first post-Darwin evolutionary biologists to look seriously at the roles of larvae in constraining and permitting evolutionary change. His book, Für Darwin, contains the germs of numerous ideas concerning recapitulation, larval ecology, punctuated equilibrium, and canalization. William Keith Brooks was interested in larval ecology and the mechanisms that promoted selectable variation. One of his students, E. B. Wilson, followed one of Mülller's paths and brought the notion of embryonic homologies into the area of developmental biology and animal classification. Frank R. Lillie took a different page out of Müller and emphasized larval adaptations.