theories of development
Theoretical Biology: conceptual foundations of the life sciences
At the dawn of the modern area of -omics based biology and a decade before the eventual completion of the human genome project, Nobel Laureate Walter Gilbert offered a prediction: “The new paradigm, now emerging, is that all the ‘genes’ will be known (in the sense of being resident in databases available electronically), and that the starting point of a biological investigation will be theoretical. An individual scientist will begin with a theoretical conjecture, only then turning to experiment to follow or test that hypothesis (Gilbert 1991).” Today, more than 15 years after this statement, it is still largely a prediction about the future. This long term project is devoted to develop an coherent conceptual and theoretical framework for biology that is grounded in the wealth of empirical data and a detailed understanding of the conceptual developments of biology during the last two centuries. Current research focuses on theories of development, the integration of developmental and evolutionary perspectives, the origin of novel phenotypes, and problems connected to the development and evolution of social systems.
Contact: Manfred Laubichler
Twentieth century theories of development
This research project takes developmental biology in the twentieth century and approaches it from two scholarly angles-theoretical biology and history of biology. The project seeks to understand how the theoretical assumptions, analytical categories, and mathematical models of developmental biology arose in interaction with several layers of scientific, socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts. These include technical innovations in experimental design and mathematical and computational representations, social and economic parameters, such as those that determine patterns of scientific funding, and cultural values as they are expressed in views about embryos and the beginning of life. This research project thus focuses from multiple perspectives on agents of scientific change. Its goal is to understand these agents historically and conceptually and also to contribute to ongoing scientific debates.
Contact: Manfred Laubichler