Abstract
Thomas
Henry Huxley, now often remembered as “Darwin’s bulldog”, wrote an
entire book dedicated to crayfish, with no less a goal than showing how
the study of crayfish could teach the reader all of zoology: “how the
careful study of one of the commonest and most insignificant of animals,
leads us, step by step, from every-day knowledge to the widest
generalizations and the most difficult problems”. In retrospect, Huxley
laid out the argument for model organisms several decades before another
Thomas, namely, Thomas Hunt Morgan, started using fruit flies as model
organisms, which became a wellspring of biological information in the
twentieth century. While biology in the nineteenth century emphasised
work on diverse species in the field, biology in the twentieth century
was driven by a few model organisms in the lab, whether they were rats
or fruit flies or Arabidopsis thaliana.
Keywords: None provided.
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