Introduction

Daily, thousands of biologists, directly or indirectly, pursue the quest of deciphering the blueprint for the body that is believed to be encoded in the DNA molecule in the hope of understanding how the fertilized egg cell transforms into the complex embryo in a matter of hours. Until this grand mystery is understood, biology is not developmentally comparable to physics, chemistry, or geology, each of which have centuries-old underlying plausible, if not observable, accounts of how the universe functions.

Daily, other biologists seek the same goals, but search for the secret of embryogenesis not in a code in the DNA but in the capacity of living tissue for structural self-organization where structure is attributed to mechanical causes.

A second mystery of biology is that of the origin of the first complex animals half a billion years ago from a single cell ancestor. Geneticists, who dominate research in America in this discipline generally, accept natural selection of random mutations as the mechanism. Structuralists believe that natural selection has had no role in the shaping of the species form, only in the modification of an unalterable phyletic body form produced by other causes.

Many biologists are unaware that there is a scientific alternative to genetic inheritance and natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge presented punctuated equilibrium as evidence of a quantified rather than a gradual transformation. Simon Conway Morris presents persuasive evidence of directed evolution in the concurrent convergent appearance of like forms throughout nature.

This book demonstrates a new model of morphogenesis based on the premise that the species body form is encoded not in the DNA, but in the self-organized structure of the egg-cell membrane. Quoted material from various sources presents the background of historical and contemporary scientific thought in the discipline of biological self-organization.

The demonstration is a topological algorithm, or morphological simulator, in the same class as computer-generated shapes of flowers, leaves, and snails. The model can account for the forms of nature in fine detail, from the forming of the body of worms to humans to the pattern of the stripes on a tiger. The text and illustrations comprise what are literally a set of construction blueprints. These demonstrate predictive usefulness well beyond coincidence.

This purported solution to the morphogenesis problem follows the investigations of the morphologists of the 18th and 19th centuries, famously by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who coined the word morphology in his quest for an Urform, the basis for all living form. Modern reckoning of the evolution of the vertebrate body was based on the work of his contemporaries and immediate followers, von Baer, Haeckel, Gegenbauer and Wilhelm His. The last, called the “father of embryology,” created physical models that demonstrate the formation of the principal organs. In 1920 Paul Weiss identified so-called morphogenetic fields as the directing effect of embryology. This continuum of mechanistic theory was eclipsed in the past century by developmental genetics, which searches for a code for the body in the genome.

In the past few years a defining architectural structure that occurs in the embryos of all animal phyla has been identified in a decade-long series of publications by biologists E. Presnov, V. Isaeva, L. Beloussov, Y. Kraus, H. Jockusch, and A. Dress (see appendix). This discovery rewrites the understanding of the embryonic membranes that shape the form of the body. Indeed, the embryonic membrane has been identified as a double-torus, or multi-torus, that is, a self-organized pair of inscribed toroidal surfaces. Rather than the result of a genetic code, the embryo is seen to be formed by the deformation of this structure by simple mechanical forces during the event called gastrulation. The ubiquitous phenomenon of convergence, the occurrence of similar forms in unrelated phyla such as eyes, jointed limbs, the bilateral segmented body, suggest a least common-denominator of form.