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Development and Evolution: Developmental Mechanisms of Evolutionary Change
- Edmund Beecher Wilson and Frank R. Lillie and the relationship between evolution and development
- Ernst Haeckel and the Biogenetic Law (An informed opinion)
In the early 1900s, a fusion of evolution and embryology was wrongly interpreted to support a linear (as opposed to a branched) model of evolution. The interpretation of Ernst Haeckel was that every organism evolved by the terminal addition of a new stage to the end of the last "highest" organism. Thus, he saw the entire animal kingdom as representing truncated steps of human development. - Haeckel and the Vertebrate Archetype
In the early 1900s, a fusion of evolution and embryology was wrongly interpreted to support a linear (as opposed to a branched) model of evolution. The interpretation of Ernst Haeckel was that every organism evolved by the terminal addition of a new stage to the end of the last "highest" organism. Thus, he saw the entire animal kingdom as representing truncated steps of human development.