Embryologists and geneticists never used to see eye to eye. As I have indicated in this book the two disciplines have now become united in a new subject formed by the fusion of developmental genetics with molecular biology (Lawrence 1992, p. 195). This paper concerns the apparent rapprochement, now underway, between genetics and developmental biology. For there to be a rapprochement, of course, there must have been long-standing disagreements. The disagreements between embryology and genetics

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... ar all the stigmata of a deep discordance between research traditions built on conflicting assumptions and practices. They have been discussed by many historians of science and shown to rest on conceptual and institutional differences, on differences in the experimental and field practices of geneticists and embryologists and on the distinctive behaviors of the biological materials they traditionally employed. 2 Suffice to say that the disagreements were based in part on the absolute inability of geneticists to show how genes could account for the Bauplan of an organism and on their failure to give any weight to such phenomena as cytoplasmic gradients in the egg, polarities in the egg and the early embryo, cell death in organogenesis, and so on. 3 These complaints against ________________________________________ 1 In press (with somewhat different figures) as chap. 11 of Epistemological Essays on Development, Evolution, and Genetics. ) for a brief account of some little-known early work along these lines and (Morgan , 1935 for one of the first widely-known articulations of an inprinciple means of combining cytoplasmic gradients with rigid nuclear and genetic determination of all potentialities of the organism. I do not know any good histories of