Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

St. George Jackson Mivart studied animals and worked in England during the nineteenth century. He also proposed a theory of organismal development that he called individuation, and he critiqued Charles Darwin's argument for evolution by natural selection. His work on prosimians, a group of primates excluding apes and monkeys, helped scientists better investigate the Primate group. In his work On the Genesis of Species, Mivart argued that Darwin's theory couldn't explain how specific organismal forms developed and varied, explanations Mivart argued were necessary before Darwin could invoke the mechanism of natural selection to explain the evolution of species. To provide those explanations Mivart proposed theories of individuation and of instinct.