ABSTRACT
Galton’s concept of nature in the nature-nurture dichotomy was instantiated or embodied in the unfolding of the fertilized germ during the course of embryonic development. In this conception, nurture, to the extent it operated at all, began to exert its major influence after birth. This was a very common or widespread scientific belief in the late 1800s. In fact, remnants of these beliefs persist to the present day in the idea that nature and nurture (or genes and environment) make separate contributions to
individual development, and that the most formative force in early development is nature or genetics, with nurture or the environment becoming more influential after birth or even later in individual development. The experimental embryology of the late 1800s was originally addressed to an analytic understanding of the role of nature or the germ in producing the individual during the course of embryonic development. Unfortunately, as will be described in this chapter and the immediately succeeding ones, the analytic investigations failed to support the necessarily primitive concepts of heredity of the day, those concepts of heredity nevertheless went unchanged, and the respective study of heredity and development went their separate ways to the detriment of both.
