"Neo-Darwinism is a hindrance to the discovery of the mechanism of evolution ...."

“The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism, which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology, seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems ....”

"We regard developing embryos as self-organizing systems ...."

"Natural Selection is a headsman who eliminates species formed by other processes."

A THEORY OF BIOLOGICAL FORM

The Body is a Blow-up of its Own Egg

Forms in living nature--whether the structure of sea urchins or the shape of the human body--result from the enlargement of the structure of the primordial germ plasm, the self-organized, universal predecessor of the plasma membrane which encompasses all eggs.

Upon fertilization the egg membrane is subdivided into an expanding tissue of proliferating cells which conserves its engrained pattern to guide the body's formation through mechanically predictable stages of regular, geometric transformations.

The basic structure underlying all others is the dynamic toroidal surface of the primordial germ plasm (also called immortal germ plasm), invisibly empatterned through eons of amoeboid streaming. Divided in two, one half dwells in the body generated by the other half, exiting before its death, to build a new body, designed by the eternal blueprint encoded in its patterned surface.

Algorithmic and geometric modeling based on the torus can generate the full gamut of living forms.

The Engines of Evolution is the publication of a controversial model of evolution, purporting to solve the 2000 year-old problem of the origin of form in living things. It presents an entirely new basis for biology, based on an algorithm that describes and predicts how living forms develop.

The theory posits that the forms of plants and animals are self-organized, driven by the topological deformation of geometric structures in the egg cell membrane.

Biodiversity is the study of how species differ, by describing the adult forms of complex animals and plants. But nature may be better understood by the study of what species have in common.

Nineteenth century morphologists sought the ancestor of form in the early stages of simple animals. German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, for instance, famously noted that the earlier the stage of the embryo, the more it resembles the embryos of more distantly related species. What then is the absolute zero of embryogenesis, the one form common to all life, the elementary particle of biology?

Goethe called it the Urform. This book is about the discovery of the Urform, the product of a ten-year search. It demonstrates that the gamut of living forms may be produced by the deformation of a single, simple structure: the dynamic toroidal surface, exemplified by the smoke ring. The germ plasm, predecessor of the egg, is a dynamic torus, as is the egg membrane, which morphs into the embryo, larva, and adult.

This theory of self-organization has been deemed plausible by leading scientists, including a Nobel laureate, but has also generated considerable controversy. Many biologists refuse to acknowledge it, and some have attempted to block its dissemination as a danger to the present dogma. No one has as yet offered a refutation.

As a visual aid to understanding, The Engines of Evolution presents twenty-four color plates that depict all the mechanical stages from a simple tubular surface to the body plans of humans, geckos, fruit-flies, lobsters, as well as the origin of the stripe patterns on tigers and zebra, and the wing patterns of butterflies. The universal predictive power of this algorithm, well beyond coincidence, implies that this is the process nature uses to form the embryo and to direct its evolution. Natural Selection is seen as a creatively irrelevant headsman, eliminating many of the variations, but originating nothing--a view shared by the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould.

This is a naturalistic, materialist explanation based on known phenomena in physics and biology, which does not support so-called intelligent design or divine intervention. The drawings constitute construction blueprints for various species of plants and animals. They could actually be used to construct the body if protoplasm could be synthesized.