ABSTRACT

I will describe ongoing studies to understand the origins of the Hubble sequence of morphological types in the context of the hierarchical cold dark matter paradigm. Quantitative morphology, using statistics such as bulge-to- total ratio, provides a means of directly comparing with theory but suffers from systematic biases which limit its utility. Comparisons with traditional, "eyeball" morphology are quite robust however. Using these results, we will describe the sequence of events which determine whether a galaxy becomes an elliptical, an almost pure disk or something in between.