Explore how life grows and regenerates, from frogs to planarians, and what that means for biology today.
This edition surveys early ideas about how organisms develop, contrasting epigenesis with preformation and the debate between mechanism and vitalism. It highlights striking regeneration experiments and what they reveal about how life organizes itself. Through concrete examples — such as a frog’s lens forming from different eye tissues and the remarkable regeneration seen in planarians and earthworms — the text traces how scientists explain development without assuming a fixed fate for each cell.
- See how scientists tested ideas about the germ cell and embryo, and what experiments revealed about organization and inheritance.
- Learn about regeneration, why younger and simpler organisms regenerate more readily, and how some tissues regenerate in surprising ways.
- Understand the tension between teleology and mechanical causation in biology, and how views have shifted with new evidence.
- Get a sense of the historical context and how modern biology approaches questions of life, growth, and structure.
Ideal for readers curious about the history and philosophy of biology, and how early theories evolved into contemporary explanations of development and life.