5 - Creative Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2009
Summary
What comes of the chemical, mechanical, and social-psychological resources an organism inherits depends on the organism and its relations with the rest of the world. It makes its own present and prepares its future, never out of whole cloth, always with the means at hand, but often with the possibility of putting them together in novel ways.
– Susan Oyama (2000a)In this short chapter, I draw on the criticisms of the modern consensus offered in Chapters 3 and 4, and so on my account of constitutive epigenetics, to produce a framework for understanding and explaining organismal development. Within this framework, genes play an important role, but as derived rather than driving factors; here, developmental agency is restricted to organisms.
I begin with a brief discussion of the benefits and limitations of developmental biology based on model systems, underscoring the lesson of Chapter 1 that we must be careful in making scientific generalisations on the basis of particular (types of) experiments. I then emphasise again the notion that the organism is the basic unit of development, and I proceed to elaborate my framework for understanding and explaining development in creative terms. In showing how and where this framework differs from the modern consensus, I discuss the dialectics of gene–organism–environment interactions in development, with particular attention to the phenomenon of niche construction.
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- Embryology, Epigenesis and EvolutionTaking Development Seriously, pp. 78 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004