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SO ENDS this first of two weekends on the merger of embryology and genetics. It is simplistic of me to suggest here that this is a case study of where science resists new ideas. Rather, the entire philosophy of the two disciplines was genuinely different, namely wholistic embryologists and reductionist geneticists, and this was at least a major part of the friction as the disciplines came closer together. View in LinkedIn

CELLULAR SEPARATION. “As Frank R. Lillie wrote in his critical review of 1927, "The germ exhibits the duality of nucleus and cytoplasm; the geneticist has taken the former for his field, the embryologist the latter." 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

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

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

It is commonplace to see ancient treasures strewn around in stonemason’s shops in Spain, waiting for homes. View in LinkedIn

PLACE-MARKERS. “Space and time are merely bookkeeping devices for conventiently summarizing relationships between objects and events in the universe. The location of an object in space has meaning only in comparison with another. Space and time are the vocabulary of these relations and nothing more.” (Excellent review of relativity). https://lnkd.in/dJ6fFGM View in LinkedIn