BioConcepts

evolutionary morphologyevolutionäre Morphologie (ger.)

• The study of an organism's design from an evolutionary perspective. (HWB 2011)
  category morphology

  1900

  The author rightly points out that botany is in a transition stage, the old ideal hypothetical morphology is disappearing, and the evolutionary morphology is rapidly displacing it. The old morphology was ideal, the new morphology is historical.

  Anonymus (1900). [Rev. Goebel, K. (1900). Organography of Plants, vol. 1]. Gardeners’ Chronicle 28 (3rd ser.), 146.

  1904

  What is first urgently required […] is the correet recognition of the phyletic lines which eventuated in the various appendages as we see them. Then may follow definitions of the parts, which may or may not succeed in assigning their strict limits When this is accomplished a terminology may follow which shall segregate parts which have had a separate phyletic origin. Thus an evolutionary morphology of the shoot would be built up.

  Bower, F.O. (1904). Plant morphology. Science 20, 524-536: 533.

  1917

  Evolutionary morphology, being for the most part a form of pure or non-functional morphology, agreed [...] in all essential respects with pre-evolutionary or transcendental morphology.

  Russell, E.S. (1917). Form and Function: 308.

  1937

  It was exactly this causal aspect of evolution which toward the close of the last century began to attract more and more attention, and which has now been taken up by genetics. In this sense genetics and not evolutionary morphology is heir to the Darwinian tradition.

  Dobzhansky, T. (1937). Genetics and the Origin of Species: 8.