Studies on comparative and ontogenetic physiology appeared in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, and the view that these two methods are important for developing the bases of the evolution of functions was formulated. The term "evolutionary physiology" was proposed by Severtsov in 1914. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Laboratory for the Development of Problems in Evolutionary Physiology was established in the USSR and a review of these studies was published. The I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology was set up in Leningrad in 1956 under the direction of Orbeli, who formulated the main study areas and methods of evolutionary physiology. This field of physiology was actively developed over the following half century. Evolutionary physiology addresses problems of the evolution of functions and functional evolution, often recruiting methods from allied scientific fields, including biochemistry, morphology, and molecular biology.