Ontogeny

Ontogeny is the development of an individual organism across its life, from its beginning through growth, maturation, and later change.

Embryogenesis: Embryogenesis is the formation and early development of an embryo. It covers ontogeny’s earliest stages, when the body plan and major tissues take shape.
Developmental biology: Developmental biology studies how organisms grow and change over their life cycles. It provides the research framework for explaining ontogeny across organisms.
Aristotle: Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher whose biological writings described animal development and reproduction. His observations of embryos made development a subject of systematic biological inquiry.
Evolutionary developmental biology: Evolutionary developmental biology studies how changes in development generate evolutionary diversity. It examines how developmental processes shape the traits that evolution can alter.
Cell differentiation: Cell differentiation is the process by which cells acquire distinct structures and functions. It explains how a developing organism produces specialized cell types.
Life cycle: A life cycle is the sequence of stages an organism passes through from its beginning to reproduction and beyond. Ontogeny unfolds through the stages that make up an organism’s life cycle.
William Harvey: William Harvey was an English physician who studied blood circulation and animal reproduction. His 1651 work on generation helped establish embryonic development as a central biological question.
Heterochrony: Heterochrony is evolutionary change in the timing or rate of developmental processes. It shows how altered developmental schedules can produce different adult forms.
Morphogenesis: Morphogenesis is the emergence of organized shapes and structures in an organism. It describes how cells arrange into the forms that distinguish successive stages of development.
Growth: Growth is an increase in an organism’s size, mass, or number of cells. It is one measurable component of development, but does not capture every change in form or function.

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