XVI International Botanical Congess

The fossil record of vascular plants is blessed with abundant detail on evolutionary changes in both external and internal organization of the shoot through time, and offers a profound perspective on plant development. The challenge is to unify comparative studies with experimental data into a comprehensive developmental/evolutionary perspective. Recently, I have offered a hypothetico-deductive formulation (Stein 1998), designed to span observations of developmental processes at scales ranging from molecular to macroscopic, based on formal logic structures. The objective is to hypothesize an explicit relationship between dynamic developmental processes and their expected static consequences in morphology. This relationship may then be tested by constructing explicit developmental models, and by comparing hypothesized evolutionary changes in development with fossil or living plants actually represented (or not) in the record.