Dudley Herron: A case of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny

CHED 223

George M. Bodner, gmbodner@purdue.edu, Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, 560 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907
For many years, developmental biologists regarded the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” as dogma. The Concise Oxford defines ontogenesis as “the origin and development of an individual” and phylogenesis as “the evolutionary development of an organism or groups of organisms” or the history of this. This paper will probe the hypothesis that under certain circumstances, phylogeny can recapitulate ontogeny – that the origin and development of one individual can set in motion the evolutionary development of a group of individuals.