Ontogeny Quotes (10 quotes)
[Other than fossils,] the most important of these other records of creation is, without doubt, ontogeny, that is, the history of the developmment of the organic individual (embryology and motamorphology). It briefly repeats in great and marked features the series of forms which the ancestors of the respective individuals have passed through from the beginning of their tribe. We have designated the palaeontological history of the development of the ancestors of a living form as the history of a tribe, or phylogeny, and we may therefore thus enunciate this exceedingly important biogenetic fundamental principle: “Ontogeny is a short and quick repetition, or recapitulation, of Phylogeny, determined by the laws of Inheritance and Adaptation.”
In Ernst Haeckel and E. Ray Lankester (trans.), The History of Creation (1876), Vol. 2, 33. Seen shortened to “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This was Haeckel's (incorrect) answer to the vexing question of his time: what is the relationship between individual development (ontogeny) and the evolution of species and lineages (phylogeny)?
Die Phylogenese ist die mechanische Ursache cler Ontogenese.
Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.
Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.
Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (1874), 7.
A living organism must be studied from two distinct aspects. One of these is the causal-analytic aspect which is so fruitfully applicable to ontogeny. The other is the historical descriptive aspect which is unravelling lines of phylogeny with ever-increasing precision. Each of these aspects may make suggestions concerning the possible significance of events seen under the other, but does not explain or translate them into simpler terms.
'Embryology and Evolution', in G. R. de Beer (ed.), Evolution: Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology presented to Professor E. S. Goodrich on his Seventieth Birthday (1938), 76-7.
Child psychology and animal psychology are of relatively slight importance, as compared with the sciences which deal with the corresponding physiological problems of ontogeny and phylogeny.
In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.
Allgemeine Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen (1866), Vol. 2, 298. Trans. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), 81.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Shortened expression of the original statement in Ernst Haeckel and E. Ray Lankester (trans.), The History of Creation (1876), Vol. 2, 33. The original paragraph is elsewhere on this webpage with comment that Haeckel was incorrect.
Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.
Allgemeine Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen (1866), Vol. 1, 60. Trans. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), 80.
The admirable perfection of the adaptations of organisms and of their parts to the functions they perform has detracted attention from the fact that adaptedness does not consist of perfect fit, but capacity to fit or to adapt in a variety of ways: only in this sense is adaptedness a guarantee of further survival and evolutionary progress, for too perfect a fit is fatal to the species if not to the individual. This, I think, sets phylogeny and ontogeny in the correct perspective. It is the genotype which bears the marks of past experience of the species and defines the range of possible fits. What fit is actually chosen, what phenotype is actually evolved, is determined by the ever renewed individual history.
'The Interplay of Heredity and Environment in the Synthesis of Respiratory Enzymes in Yeast', The Harvey Lectures: Delivered under the auspices of The Harvey Society of New York 1950-1951, 1951, 156, 45-6.
The development of the nucleoplasm during ontogeny may be to some extent compared to an army composed of corps, which are made up of divisions, and these of brigades, and so on. The whole army may be taken to represent the nucleoplasm of the germ-cell: the earliest cell-division … may be represented by the separation of the two corps, similarly formed but with different duties: and the following celldivisions by the successive detachment of divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, etc.; and as the groups become simpler so does their sphere of action become limited.
In 'The Continuity of the Germ-plasm as the Foundation of a Theory of Heredity' (1885), Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems (1891), Vol. 1, 195.
The History of Evolution of Organisms consists of two kindred and closely connected parts: Ontogeny, which is the history of the evolution of individual organisms, and Phylogeny, which is the history of the evolution of organic tribes. Ontogency is a brief and rapid recapitulation of Phylogeny, dependent on the physiological functions of Heredity (reproduction) and Adaptation (nutrition). The individual organism reproduces in the rapid and short course of its own evolution the most important of the changes in form through which its ancestors, according to laws of Heredity and Adaptation, have passed in the slow and long course of their palaeontological evolution.
Translated from his Generelle Morphologie (1866) as an epigraph to Chap. 1, The Evolution of Man, (1886), Vol 1, 1-2.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
