Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 General Introduction
- PART I METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
- PART II EVOLUTION
- PART III GENETICS AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
- PART IV DEVELOPMENT
- 10 Lillie's Paradox – Or, Some Hazards of Cellular Geography
- 11 On Conflicts between Genetic and Developmental Viewpoints – and Their Attempted Resolution in Molecular Biology
- 12 Reconceiving Animals and Their Evolution: On Some Consequences of New Research on the Modularity of Development and Evolution
- Index
- References
11 - On Conflicts between Genetic and Developmental Viewpoints – and Their Attempted Resolution in Molecular Biology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 General Introduction
- PART I METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
- PART II EVOLUTION
- PART III GENETICS AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
- PART IV DEVELOPMENT
- 10 Lillie's Paradox – Or, Some Hazards of Cellular Geography
- 11 On Conflicts between Genetic and Developmental Viewpoints – and Their Attempted Resolution in Molecular Biology
- 12 Reconceiving Animals and Their Evolution: On Some Consequences of New Research on the Modularity of Development and Evolution
- Index
- References
Summary
Embryologists and geneticists never used to see eye to eye. As I have indicated in this book the two disciplines have now become united in a new subject formed by the fusion of developmental genetics with molecular biology
(Lawrence 1992, p. 195).This chapter concerns the apparent rapprochement, now underway, between genetics and developmental biology. For there to be a rapprochement, of course, there must have been long-standing disagreements. The disagreements between embryology and genetics bear all the stigmata of a deep discordance between research traditions built on conflicting assumptions and practices. They have been discussed by many historians of science and shown to rest on conceptual and institutional differences, on differences in the experimental and field practices of geneticists and embryologists and on the distinctive behaviors of the biological materials they traditionally employed. Suffice it to say that the disagreements were based in part on the absolute inability of geneticists to show how genes could account for the Bauplan of an organism and on their failure to give any weight to such phenomena as cytoplasmic gradients in the egg, polarities in the egg and the early embryo, cell death in organogenesis, and so on. These complaints against genetics were just and remain so, although that fact does not reveal whether they are biologically or philosophically important.
The rapprochement of interest here results from the application of powerful new molecular techniques to basic biological problems and from fundamental conceptual revisions now under way in both genetics and developmental biology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Epistemology of Development, Evolution, and Genetics , pp. 210 - 233Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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