Editing Ontogeny (section)

==History==

The term ontogeny was coined by [[Ernst Haeckel]], a German zoologist and evolutionist in the 1860s.  Haeckel, born in Germany on February 16, 1834, was also a strong supporter of [[Darwinism]]. Haeckel suggested that ontogeny briefly and sometimes incompletely recapitulated or repeated phylogeny in his 1866 book, ''Generelle Morphologie der Organismen'' ("General Morphology of Organisms").  Even though his book was widely read, the scientific community was not very convinced or interested in his ideas, so he turned to producing more publications to get more attention.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Robinson |first=Gloria |date=12 February 2022 |title=Ernst Haeckel {{!}} German embryologist {{!}} Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernst-Haeckel |access-date=2022-03-09 |website=Encyclopedia Britannica |language=en}}</ref>  In 1866, Haeckel and others imagined development as producing new structures after earlier additions to the developing organism have been established. He proposed that individual development followed developmental stages of previous generations and that the future generations would add something new to this process, and that there was a causal parallelism between an animal's ontogeny and phylogeny. In addition, Haeckel suggested a biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, based on the idea that the successive and progressive origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. According to Haeckel, development produced novelties, and natural selection would eliminate species that had become outdated or obsolete. Though his view of development and evolution wasn't justifiable, future embryologists tweaked and collaborated with Haeckel's proposals and showed how new morphological structures can occur by the hereditary modification of embryonic development.<ref name="Gilbert-2015">{{Cite book |last1=Gilbert |first1=Scott F. |title=Ecological Developmental Biology |last2=Epel |first2=David |year=2015 |isbn=978-1-60535-344-9 |edition=2nd |pages=170–171|publisher=Sinauer }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Barnes |first=M. |date=2014-05-03 |title=Ernst Haeckel's Biogenetic Law (1866) {{!}} The Embryo Project Encyclopedia |url=https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/ernst-haeckels-biogenetic-law-1866 |access-date=2022-04-07 |website=embryo.asu.edu}}</ref>  Marine biologist [[Walter Garstang]] reversed Haeckel's relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny, stating that ontogeny creates phylogeny, not recapitulates it.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Gilbert |first1=Scott F. |title=Ecological Developmental Biology |last2=Epel |first2=David |publisher=Sinauer Associates, Inc. |year=2015 |isbn=978-1-60535-344-9 |edition=2nd |pages=357}}</ref>

A seminal 1963 paper by [[Nikolaas Tinbergen]] named ontogeny as one of the [[Tinbergen's four questions|four primary questions]] of biology, along with [[Julian Huxley|Julian Huxley's]] three others: causation, survival value and evolution.<ref name="Tinbergen" /> Tinbergen emphasized that the change of behavioral ''machinery'' during development was distinct from the change in behavior during development. We can conclude that the thrush itself, i.e. its behavioral machinery, has changed only if the behavior change occurred while the environment was held constant...When we turn from description to causal analysis, and ask in what way the observed change in behavior machinery has been brought about, the natural first step is to try and distinguish between environmental influences and those within the animal...In ontogeny the conclusion that a certain change is internally controlled (is 'innate') is reached by ''elimination''.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34321442|title=Foundations of animal behavior : classic papers with commentaries|date=1996|others=Lynne D. Houck, Lee C. Drickamer, Animal Behavior Society|isbn=0-226-35456-3|location=Chicago|oclc=34321442}}</ref> Tinbergen was concerned that the elimination of environmental factors is difficult to establish, and the use of the word innate is often misleading.