Idealistic morphology

I don't think this sort of approach is as forgotten as you believe. It certainly isn't a popular mainstream theory but it is a recognised one. The type of morphological platonism you describe nowadays goes under the sobriquet of 'Process structuralism', which is a far closer fit than Davison's PEH.One current proponent of 'Process Structuralism' is Brian Goodwin who frames his approach as part of a lineage from Goethe and Wittgenstein by way of D'arcy Thomson. Richard Sternberg also describes himself as a process structuralist.Rather than adhering strictly to platonic-ideals of form the process structuralists talk of underlying formal principles which govern the morphology of organisms, the difference is perhaps only the extent to which one seems to require a form of cartesian dualism while the other can still be framed in a materialist manner depending on what the basis of the formal principles or laws actually is.TTFN,WK

I don't see where the anti-darwinian bit comes in. How is this any more anti-darwinian than saying that all vertebrates can be considered a variation of an ideal vertebrate 'bauplan'? Common descent would lead us to expect that groups descended from common ancestral populations would present variations, of highly varying degree, upon the form of that ancestor.TTFN,WK

I have to say Martin you certainly bring some interesting material to the debate. This is a very interesting paper. It seems to agree with my position that 'typology', i.e. the existence of an ideal bauplan or ur-Pflanze, does not need to conflict with neo-darwinian theory.The conflict, as the paper suggests, come from associated ideas such as essentialism or creationism, and these ideas may predispose their proponents to favour typology and see it as conflicting with modern evolutionary theory.Troll's position seems to be based upon some massive assumptions, i.e. 'an organism has a certain independence in relation to the causal events and controls them more than it itself is controlled’. There seems to be pretty much no evidence for this being the case unless this control is thought of simply as the genetic 'program' of development.TTFN,WK