# Talk:Evolutionary developmental biology

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I wanted to refresh my memory on Turing's contribution to this field. My understanding is that he and I believe D'Arcy Thompson wrote at least one paper where they essentially mapped out some of the core ideas: that constraints from math, physics, etc. shaped the type of phenotypes that could result from changes to genotype. I may be saying that wrong, Biology isn't my field, but I know I've seen several mentions that Turing wrote about the basic ideas of evo-devo many years before it was rediscovered and became an active field of biology. MadScientistX11 (talk) 16:01, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Turing wrote a paper on how in theory patterns (in fur or feathers) could appear. Much later, evo-devo found that he'd broadly guessed correctly. Thompson (already in the article) didn't believe in evolution, which could be seen as a small problem in making him a father of evo-devo; he wanted to show that body shapes arose spontaneously, rather than through biochemical mechanisms under natural selection. I suppose if we're going to go back to the beginning, whatever that is, we'd start with Aristotle, who speculated that bodies come into being through a selection of parts; this most likely meant embryonic development (ontogeny) not phylogeny, i.e. after conception the appropriate parts are selected (from some non-physical space?) and assembled. I'm not sure any of this is exactly evo-devo, more the history of biology, but perhaps a brief paragraph of 'Precursors' or 'Historical background' would not go amiss. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:15, 14 May 2023 (UTC)