Origination of Organismal Form
book by Gerd Müller
Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology is an anthology published in 2003 edited by Gerd B. Müller and Stuart A. Newman. The book is the outcome of the 4th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology on "Origins of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene Paradigm", hosted in 1999 at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. It has been cited over 200 times and has a major influence on extended evolutionary synthesis research.
Description of the book
The book explores the multiple factors that may have been responsible for the origination of biological form in multicellular life. These biological forms include limbs, segmented structures, and different body symmetries.
It explores why the basic body plans of nearly all multicellular life arose in the relatively short time span of the Cambrian Explosion. The authors focus on physical factors (structuralism) other than changes in an organism's genome that may have caused multicellular life to form new structures. These physical factors include differential adhesion of cells and feedback oscillations between cells.
The book also presents recent experimental results that examine how the same embryonic tissues or tumor cells can be coaxed into forming dramatically different structures under different environmental conditions.
One of the goals of the book is to stimulate research that may lead to a more comprehensive theory of evolution.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Origination of Organismal Form” as book by Gerd Müller. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as book by Gerd Müller. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7102615. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Origination of Organismal Form” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.