Investigations Into Drosophila Wing Development—Results from a Lindenmayer Model

In this time of significant and exciting new understandings in genetics, there has been a persistent, but largely unfulfilled expectation that the instructions for generating an organism are somehow directly encoded in its genetic program, and that full understanding of developmental mechanisms would accompany knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of gene control. We are now realizing that a simple, one-step explanation of development at this ultimate reductionist level is unlikely. As Brenner puts it (quoted in Lewin, 1984) “Ultimately the organism must be explicable in terms of its genes,… But the representation will not be explicit. We need to understand the grammar of development to make sense of it.” It is this grammar of spatial and dynamic organization of complex systems that Lindenmayer’s algorithms seek to model.