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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

EMBRYOLOGIST PAUL WEISS. “The true test of a reductionist system is whether or not an ordered unitary system...can, after decomposition into a disorderly pile of constituent parts, resurrect itself from the shambles by virtue solely of the properties inherent in the isolated pieces." 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

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