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Title Towards a theory of development / edited by Alessandro Minelli, Thomas Pradeu
Edition First edition
Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014
©2014

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  571.8 Min/Tat  AVAILABLE
Description xiii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Contents Contents note continued: 11.From genes to gene regulatory networks: the progressive historical construction of a genetic theory of development and evolution / Michel Morange -- 12.Reproduction and scaffolded developmental processes: an integrated evolutionary perspective / James Griesemer -- 13.Comparison of animal and plant development: a right track to establish a theory of development? / Michel Vervoort -- 14.Towards a theory of development through a theory of developmental evolution / Armin P. Moczek -- 15.Developmental disparity / Alessandro Minelli -- 16.Identifying some theories in developmental biology: the case of the cancer stem cell theory / Lucie Laplane -- 17.Animal development in a microbial world / Margaret J. McFall-Ngai
Machine generated contents note: 1.Theories of development in biology---problems and perspectives / Thomas Pradeu -- 2.Regenerating theories in developmental biology / Thomas Pradeu -- 3.The erotetic organization of developmental biology / Alan C. Love -- 4.On the concept of mechanism in development / James Sharpe -- 5.The epistemological resilience of the concept of morphogenetic field / Isaac Hernandez -- 6.Physico-genetics of morphogenesis: the hybrid nature of developmental mechanisms / Stuart A. Newman -- 7.The landscape metaphor in development / Emanuele Serrelli -- 8.Formalizing theories of development: a fugue on the orderliness of change / Jonathan Bard -- 9.General theories of evolution and inheritance, but not development? / Wallace Arthur -- 10.Cell differentiation is a stochastic process subjected to natural selection / Jean-Jacques Kupiec --
Summary Is it possible to explain and predict the development of living things? What is development? Answers to these innocuous questions are far from straightforward. To date, no systematic, targeted effort has been made to construct a unifying theory of development. This text offers a unique exploration of the foundations of ontogeny by asking how the development of living things should be understood. It explores the key concepts of developmental biology, asks whether general principles of development can be discovered, and examines the role of models and theories. This book analyses a wealth of approaches to concepts, models and theories of development, such as gene regulatory networks, accounts based on systems biology and on physics of soft matter, the different articulations of evolution and development, symbiont-induced development, as well as the widely discussed concepts of positional information and morphogenetic field, the idea of a 'programme' of development and its critiques, and the long-standing opposition between preformationist and epigenetic conceptions of development
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject Developmental biology.
Embryology.
Evolution (Biology)
Evolutionary developmental biology.
Life (Biology)
Life cycle, Human.
Author Minelli, Alessandro, editor
Pradeu, Thomas, editor
ISBN 9780199671427 (hardback)
9780199671434 (paperback)