Ontogeny and phylogeny

What Hacker News says

1. jhedwardsMar 2020
   This idea is explored heavily by Steven J. Gould in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. I highly recommend anyone interested in this idea to check it out. As far as I remember the "fallacy" is not that these stages exist, but that evolution works by adding new stages on top and pushing the previous stages down into development.
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2. jhedwardsAug 2015
   1) Biology and Knowledge by Jean Piaget

   2) Ontogeny and Phylogeny by S.J. Gould

   3) The Logic of Life by Francois Jacob

   These books have very little fluff and will challenge you to think in new ways about evolution, biology, and the development of human knowledge.

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3. btillyJul 2013
   As a biologist and chemist studying cancer, this sounds an awful like the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" theory which, while a cute just-so story, turns out to be a particularly misleading way of looking at developmental biology.

   It is misleading, but with a small kernel of truth that appears in the article.

   That kernel is that there is little evolutionary pressure to cause changes in early development, and huge potential consequences to adjustment there, so early development is remarkably stable across many species. And this conservation goes right down to the genetic level. Thus it is wrong that we trace out our evolutionary heritage, however it is true that there are similarities between early development of distant species, and that commonality is due to conserved genes that evolved a very long time ago.

   (There is, of course, another commonality. And that is the observation due to Gould in Ontogeny and Phylogeny that a lot of the raw material for evolution comes from altering the timing and rates of existing development processes, rather than from introducing "new" features.)

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