Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2023
We are all familiar with the changes in an organism during development, followed by its reproduction, which are repeated generation after generation. Biologists describe this development–reproduction sequence as the life cycle: the series of transformations and reproductive events that, from a given stage of life of an organism, leads to the corresponding stage in a subsequent generation. We can describe a biological cycle as going from zygote to zygote, but also from adult to adult, or from embryo to embryo: in a cyclical process, the choice of the ‘initial phase’ is arbitrary or conventional, as the notorious ‘the chicken or the egg’ dilemma beautifully illustrates.
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