Inclusion and exclusion in the history of developmental biology

Abstract

Scientific disciplines embody commitments to particular questions and approaches, scopes and audiences; they exclude as well as include. Developmental biology is no exception, and it is useful to reflect on what it has kept in and left out since the field was founded after World War II. To that end, this article sketches a history of how developmental biology has been different from the comparative, human and even experimental embryologies that preceded it, as well as the embryology that was institutionalized in reproductive biology and medicine around the same time. Early developmental biology largely excluded evolution and the environment, but promised to embrace the entire living world and the whole life course. Developmental biologists have been overcoming those exclusions for some years, but might do more to deliver on the promises while cultivating closer relations, not least, to reproductive studies.

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