Etienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire: father of "evo-devo"?
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the most important disagreement among comparative anatomists was not evolution versus "special creation" but between advocates of "transcendental morphology" and those of teleological anatomy-form versus function. In France this dichotomy was represented by the 1830-1832 public debate between Geoffroy St.-Hilaire (form) and Cuvier (function). Geoffroy's aim was to establish links of homology (known to him as "analogies") between the four "embranchements" into which Cuvier had divided the animal kingdom. Despite the fanciful nature of some of his homologies, Geoffroy, who was guided by his "principe de connections," set in motion a school of morphology, some of whose conclusions, notably the homology of the dorsal surface of segmented invertebrates with the ventral surface of vertebrates, has been corroborated by recent studies in developmental genetics.
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Department of Marine Sciences, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.
D000715:Anatomy / Q000266:history*; D005075:Biological Evolution; D049672:History, 19th Century