Form, function and biological architecture
A proposal for classifying the evolution of complexity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35305/cf2.vi19.186Keywords:
form, function, biological architecture, adaptationism, evolutionAbstract
The concepts of evolution and evolutionary change are both vague and polysemous: they apply to very diverse phenomena and are not always precisely defined. Moreover, the widespread classical neo-Darwinian paradigm tends to impose an adaptationist scheme on the analysis of evolutionary facts, in which functions play a role logically prior to traits and their forms. In this paper, we propose, as a preliminary step to the development of hypotheses about the causes of change, a form-function space model that can address when trait change occurs in a biological architecture. Such a model allows us to clearly show the evolutionary scope of the different types of changes in form and function.
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