Abstract
The view that developmental biology does offer theories is defended in this chapter, on the basis of three main arguments. Firstly, several other biological fields routinely formulate theories, and these fields do not seem to possess any characteristic that developmental biology would lack. Secondly, embryology and developmental biology have offered theories in the past. Thirdly, several developmental biologists (admittedly not numerous, but often among the most influential ones) have insisted on the role of theories in their field and have themselves formulated theories. The definition of a ‘theory’ as a structured set of testable explanatory and predictive hypotheses makes this notion widely applicable to current biological fields, and in particular it makes possible to speak of . This chapter analyses some examples of such theories in recent developmental biology, and suggests some avenues for the further construction of developmental theories and their articulation into a growingly unifying picture of developmental processes.
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