Evolution and development: Past, present, and future

Abstract

The paper tries to set right certain ideas about the history of evolutionary developmental biology. The main point is, that we had to enface the dominance of a comparative approach towards evolutionary developmental biology before 1900, which even later on was effective in Russia, for example, till the 1930s. The problem of the experimentalist approach set against this tradition was and is that there is no concept of gestalt that may allow to integrate the former comparative views and the modern mechanistic interpretations. We argue, that it would be wrong just to describe the comparative tradition as being outdated, as it may allow to get the framework for a dynamical concept of Gestalt that may integrate the ideas of morphogenesis and pattern formation worked out in evo-devo recently.