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DIFFERENT PARADIGMS. “Embryologist Berrill, for instance writes repeatedly of "the amazing diversity of developmental performances" and "the complex reality" of embryonic development. Molecular biologists such as Monod claim that the elephant is constructed on the same principles and using the same materials as E. coli. The aesthetic of molecular biology is abstract formalism.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

THE CRUX OF THE SPLIT. “Embryology has a tradition of celebrating the complexity and diversity of life. Molecular biology has a tradition of celebrating life's underlying unity and simplicity.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

CLASH OF PARADIGMS. “Pnina Abir-Am (1991) has shown the difficulties that Joseph Needham experienced in his attempt to try to reconcile the holistic embryology of the 1930s with reductionist chemistry. The chemists saw the constantly changing embryo as poor material from which they could isolate and characterize their enzymes.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

HOLIST VIEWPOINT. “He graphically illustrated this point by showing a photograph of an intact chick embryo, a chick embryo that had been blended through a homogenizer, and a chick embryo whose homogenized components had been centrifuged. The problem for reductionists, he maintained, was how to get that chicken back.” (Weiss). https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

CYTOPLASMIC SCIENCE. “Indeed, the concept of gene expression is absent in the major embryology books of the 1920s through the 1940s. Although experimental embryology had successfully separated itself from the earlier traditions of developmental anatomy, it remained a phenotypic science, and it identified itself as a science concerned with cytoplasmic changes.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

FIELDS NOT GENES. “The evidence gave coalesced into a concept called the morphogenetic field, and this morphological unit, rather than the gene, was seen as being the fundamental unit of development (and in the case of planaria, inheritance).” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

GOLDEN ERA. “But while the geneticists were making their great discoveries into the mechanism of hereditary transmission, the embryologists were also having their own golden era. Ignoring genetics altogether, embryologists embarked on the program which Joseph Needham (1936) christened "Gestaltungsgesetze, the rules of morphological order." https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

HIGHER GROUND. “After this separation of genetics from embryology, the geneticists defined themselves against embryology. They often depicted embryology as being an intellectual backwater and saw themselves as the true heirs of Darwin and the question of heredity.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

ENTROPY AS AREA. “The analogy with the tendency of entropy to increase led me to propose in 1972 that a black hole has entropy proportional to the area of its horizon.” https://lnkd.in/draqjTW View in LinkedIn

TAKEOVER BY GENETICS. “Note how embryology's main question is said to be differentiation, not morphogenesis. Note also how genetics can now take over this question. Embryology is being reduced to genetics. And why not, since the geneticists will write that they have the superior methodology.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn