The Adequacy of Model Systems for Evo-Devo: Modeling the Formation of Organisms/ Modeling the Formation of Society

The writer Jorge Luis Borges tells us of a wondrous Chinese encyclopedia whose classification of animals begins with the dichotomous branch: Those animals belonging to the emperor, and those animals that don’t (see Foucault 1970). In the social scheme of scientific organisms, a similar wisdom prevails. There are those privileged imperial organisms called model systems, and then there are all the other organisms. There are seven basic model systems of developmental biology: the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster; the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the mouse Mus musculis, the frog Xenopus laevis, the zebrafish Danio rerio, the chick Gallus gallus, and the mustard Arabidopsis thaliana. For many researchers, having their experimental organism be considered a model system is an important goal.