MARY JANE WEST-EBERHARD
Scientist Emerita
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Adjunct Professor, Biological Sciences,
Louisiana State University In 2003, Mary Jane West-Eberhard published Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, the culmination of many years of reflection and observation on the links between developmental biology and evolution. The seeds of this book had been planted 40 years earlier, when West-Eberhard was an earnest zoology undergraduate student at the University of Michigan.
In 1961, as a junior in college, West-Eberhard wrote a research paper for a class taught by entomologist Richard Alexander—who would later become her doctoral advisor—on the evolution of dance communication in honeybees.
Forager honeybees perform a “waggle dance” in the shape of a figure eight to communicate information to their colony mates about the direction and distance to nectar and water sources. Digging through studies of insect movement, West-Eberhard came across a University of Michigan thesis on movements of hemipteran insects—the true bugs. The student had observed that bugs placed in a maze would alternate between turning right and left—which he called “twig behavior” because it allows insects to reach an end of a branched twig. West-Eberhard proposed that honeybees performing the waggle dance ...
