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This leads him to propose that the "space" describing biological "design" is connected with the space describing human culture and technology. A precise mathematical definition of Design Space is not given in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dennett acknowledges this and admits he is offering a philosophical idea rather than a scientific formulation. [16]
Reproduction (or procreation or breeding) is the biological process by which new individual organisms – "offspring" – are produced from their "parent" or parents. There are two forms of reproduction: asexual and sexual. In asexual reproduction, an organism can reproduce without the involvement of another organism.
Developmental biology is the study of the process by which animals and plants grow and develop. Developmental biology also encompasses the biology of regeneration , asexual reproduction , metamorphosis , and the growth and differentiation of stem cells in the adult organism.
Since the reproduction is asexual, the newly created organism is a clone and, excepting mutations, is genetically identical to the parent organism. Organisms such as hydra use regenerative cells for reproduction in the process of budding. In hydra, a bud develops as an outgrowth due to repeated cell division of the parent body at one specific site.
The distance that a plant can move during vegetative reproduction is limited, though some plants can produce ramets from branching rhizomes or stolons that cover a wide area, often in only a few growing seasons. In a sense, this process is not one of reproduction but one of survival and expansion of biomass of the individual.
Zoology – study of animals, including classification, physiology, development, and behavior. Subbranches include: Arthropodology – biological discipline concerned with the study of arthropods, a phylum of animals that include the insects, arachnids, crustaceans and others that are characterized by the possession of jointed limbs.
A form of asexual reproduction related to parthenogenesis is gynogenesis. Here, offspring are produced by the same mechanism as in parthenogenesis, but with the requirement that the egg merely be stimulated by the presence of sperm in order to develop. However, the sperm cell does not contribute any genetic material to the offspring.
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed using Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the ...