Microcosm, Type and Individuation

At the turn of the 19th century, the conceptualization of individual development and its speculative extension to the entire organization of the living world have since proved indispensable to the establishment of biology as a unified science. As a synthetic theory of acquired morphological knowledge, parallelism subordinated the study of development to findings and method of comparative anatomy, such that the first stages of the germ's formation were retrospectively inferred from germs of organs usually visible to the naked eye. Through the partial or complete isolation of embryonic parts, embryology unveiled both their capacity for self-differentiation and their unsuspected power for self-regulation. The mastering of embryonic transplantation led to the discovery of such a determining cause and established itself as preferred methodological arsenal of a booming experimental embryology. Biological development remains a cyclical phenomenon of individuation, the typological plan of which is grounded on genomic heritage conserved in large portions of phylogeny.