The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, hereafter called The Spandrels, is an article written by Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979. The paper emphasizes issues with what the two authors call adaptationism or the adaptationist programme as a framework to explain how species and traits evolved. The paper is one in a series of works in which Gould emphasized the role of development in evolutionary theories. The article suggests that constraints on how organisms can develop and constraints on how species can evolve from others play a central role in explaining the how species and traits evolve. The authors note that organisms from different species develop as embryos through stages similar across species, genera, and higher classes. Gould and Lewontin hypothesize that those stages constrained the possible pathways of evolution and has therefore guided the history of life. Throughout the paper, the authors rely on analogy of some parts of organisms to architectural structures called spandrels, marked in this image as 'a'."

George McDonald Church studied DNA from living and from extinct species in the US during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Church helped to develop and refine techniques with which to describe the complete sequence of all the DNA nucleotides in an organism's genome, techniques such as multiplex sequencing, polony sequencing, and nanopore sequencing. Church also contributed to the Human Genome Project, and in 2005 he helped start a company, the Personal Genome Project. Church proposed to use DNA from extinct species to clone and breed new organisms from those species.

In “Testing the Kin Selection Theory: Who Controls the Investments?” Bert Hölldobler and Edward Osborne Wilson discussed the predictive power of kin selection theory, a theory about the evolution of social behaviors. As part of Hölldobler's and Wilson's 1990 book titled The Ants, Hölldobler and Wilson compared predictions about the reproductive practices of ants to data about the reproductive practices of ants. They showed that the data generally supported the expected behaviors proposed by kin selection theory. Later in their careers, both Hölldobler and Wilson argued that kin selection theory provided an insufficient explanation for the evolution of social behavior. Hölldobler and Wilsons' efforts were emblematic of a larger trend among ant researchers and sociobiologists to explain the evolution of social behavior by focusing on the reproductive dynamics of social organisms.

Ameisen: Die heimliche Weltmacht (Ants: Nature’s Secret Power) is a nature documentary about ants. Wolfgang Thaler wrote, filmed, and directed the film, which focuses on the work of ant researcher Bert Hölldobler. The 2004 film was produced by Adi Mayer Film for Österreichischer Rundfunk (Austrian Broadcasting), a public service broadcaster headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Ants: Nature’s Secret Power (Ants) surveys the adaptive and reproductive behaviors of a variety of ant species in both laboratory and natural settings. Thaler’s and Hölldoblers’ film communicated the reproductive practices of ants to a popular audience in an accessible manner, familiarizing the public with rarely seen aspects of ants.

In 1984, Dante Cicchetti published “The Emergence of Developmental Psychopathology,” an article in which he argued that the previously amorphous study of developmental psychopathology was emerging as a unified discipline. According to Cicchetti, developmental psychopathology describes an interdisciplinary field that studies abnormalities in psychological function that can arise during human development. Such studies include research about the effects that traumatic experiences may have on the development of psychological disorders and about what behaviors are considered normal or abnormal at different ages. In the article, Cicchetti reports about the origins of developmental psychopathology, why it emerged as its own discipline, and why researchers should study it. In addition to recognizing the field of developmental psychopathology, the article informed later research about preventing and treating the harmful psychological effects of early traumatic events.