TRIBUTE: In Goethe's Wake: Marvalee Wake's conceptual contributions to the development and evolution of a science of morphology

Decrying the typological approach in much of the teaching of morphology, from the outset of her career Marvalee Wake advocated a synthetic, mechanistic and pluralistic developmental and evolutionary morphology. In this short essay, I do not evaluate Wake's contributions to our knowledge of the morphology of caecilians, nor her contributions to viviparity, both of which are seminal and substantive, nor do I examine her role as mentor, supervisor and collaborator, but assess her broader conceptual contributions to the development and evolution of morphology as a science. One of the earliest morphologists to take on board the concept of constraint, she viewed constraint explicitly in relation to adaptation and diversity. Her approach to morphology as a science was hierarchical – measure form and function in a phylogenetic context; seek explanations at developmental, functional, ecological, evolutionary levels of the biological hierarchy; integrate those explanations to the other levels. The explanatory power of morphology thus practised allows morphology to inform evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory, and paves the way for the integrative biology Wake has long championed.