History of the concept of allometry

SYNOPSIS. Synopsis. Allometry designates the changes in relative dimensions of parts of the body that are correlated with changes in overall size. Jul ian Huxley and Georges Teissier coined this term in 1936. In a joint paper, they agreed to use this term in order to avoid confusion in the held of re lative growth. They also agreed on the conventional symbols to use in the a lgebraic formula: y = bx(alpha). Julian Huxley is often said to have discov ered the "law of constant differential growth" in 1924, but a similar formu la had been used earlier by several authors, in various contexts, and under various titles. Three decades before Huxley, Dubois and Lapicque used a po wer law and logarithmic coordinates for the description of the relation bet ween brain size and body size in mammals, both from an intraspecific, and a n interspecific, point of view. Later on, in the 1910s and early 1920s, Pez ard and Champy's work an sexual characters provided decisive experimental e vidence in favor of a law of relative growth at the level of individual dev elopment. This paper examines: (1) early works on relative growth, and their relation to Huxley and Teissier's "discovery"; (2) Teissier and Huxley's joint pape r of 1936, in particular their tacit disagreement on the signification of t he coefficient "b"; and (3) the status of allometry in evolutionary theory after Huxley, especially in the context of paleobiology.