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Definition of "ontogenesis" [on•to•gen•e•sis]

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Use "ontogenesis" in a sentence
  • "The existence of switches that steer ontogenesis between disparate but functional developmental pathways raises the question of which came first – the switches or the pathways?"
  • "One might expect that since current orthodoxy maintains that biological processes of ontogenesis proceed differently from the selectionist processes of phylogenesis, evolutionary epistemologies would reflect this difference."
  • "B.F. Skinner's theory of operant conditioning, which deals with the ontogenesis of individual behavior, is explicitly based upon the Darwinian selectionist model (Skinner 1981)."