The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Development of Organisms

(1) Individual development, or ontogeny, is the aggregate of successive morphological and physiological changes experienced by every organism from the moment of birth to the end of life. Development is a process of closely related quantitative and qualitative rearrangements. Quantitative changes—growth—consist in increase in weight and size of the organism as a whole and of individual body parts or organs. Qualitative changes—differentiation—consist in rearrangement of structure and function of the organism and its parts and organs.

(2) Historical development, or phylogeny, of organisms and their taxonomic groups (phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, species) throughout their existence on earth. The connection between ontogeny and phylogeny is that phylogeny consists in a historical series of ontogenies that have undergone natural selection. (See alsoONTOGENY.)

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References in periodicals archive

Core Idea: LS1.B: Growth and development of organisms

Real-Life Zombies: Parasites invaded these four animals and turned them into the living dead

Sheldrake proposed his theory of morphogenetic fields as the only viable alternative to mechanistic and vitalistic theories to explain biological morphogenesis (in general, the issue of biological development of organisms from simple structures, and even the continued development of organisms when a part of the organism is removed).

Crimes of Reason: On Mind, Nature, and the Paranormal

Texas: This measure, House Bill 285, was aimed at universities and would have forbade any institution of higher education to "discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member's or student's conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms." It died in committee.

Creationists suffer defeats in eight legislatures, science croup reports

The University of Edinburgh team's work, which included his wife Noreen, was hailed as a revolution for scientists in terms of understanding how cells work, how genetics works and how to understand the development of organisms so treatments can be devised when things go wrong.

Tributes to creator of hepatitis vaccine who studied in city

Synthetic biology's baseline cases are those in which it aims at the development of organisms that are contained and that are thought to be incapable of surviving in the field anyway, both because they have traits that would make them weak competitors in the wild and because they have been designed to self-destruct in the wild.

Of microbes and men

For high school and college students, scholars, and general readers, this volume describes the applications of DNA technology in forensic science, the development of organisms with genetic characteristics of two different species, genetic testing, gene therapy, molecular farming, and cloning.

DNA technology; a reference handbook

Similarly, the structural nature of ontogenetic development of organisms typically leads to the existence of nonadaptive structural elements (spandrels).

Dialectical Nature: reflections in honor of the twentieth anniversary of Levins and Lewontin's The Dialectical Biologist

This included evidence about the development of organisms that could be used in biological warfare, and the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence services in possible biological warfare activities.

The key findings