Morphological description of plants: new perspectives in development and evolution

Zusammenfassung

The morphological description of plants has been fundamental in the history of botany and provided the keys for taxonomy. Nevertheless,in biology, a discipline governed by the interest in function and based on reductionist approaches, the analysis of forms has been relegatedto second place. Plants contain organs and structures that resemble geometrical forms. Plant ontogeny may be seen as a sequence ofgrowth processes including periods of continuous growth with modification that stop at crucial points often represented by structures ofremarkable similarity to geometrical figures. Instead of the tradition in developmental studies giving more importance to animal models,we propose that the modular type of plant development may serve to remark conceptual aspects in that may be useful in studies withanimals and contribute to original views of evolution.