EMBRYO GEOMETRY LAB

THE LIFECYCLE

The inevitable geometry of living form originates in the advent of the lipid molecule and its property to gather in bilayer sheets that curve to form alternately expanding and dividing bilayer spheres.

Axiom
A curved bilayer sheet reverses its curvature as it expands due to the difference in the tension of the layers. Hence, an expanding spheroidal bilayer surface turns inside-out sequentially.

Observed Fact  
The first cleavage of the vertebrate egg is unequal volumetrically and incomplete, preserving a capillary connection between the two oocytes.  

Theorem
Of the two oocytes, the larger is the progenitor of the germline and the smaller is the soma body. The germ body periodically divides and regenerates the lost half. The soma membrane shrinks, forming the embryo.

Hypothetical Model 
Each of the unequal oocyte pairs subdivide, forming a pair of gridded spheres, whereupon the smaller flows into the larger while its membrane shrinks into a small, shriveled shape that is forced to transport to the interior of the larger sphere as the embryo. Whereupon the remaining gridded membrane of the larger of the two oocytes is drawn into the interior of the embryo where each cell as totipotent oocyte, may later divide upon fertilization, repeating the cycle (Figs. a - k).

Conclusion 
The inevitable topological trajectory of an expanding spherical bilayer is the periodical, sequential inversion of the surface guided by a deformation of the phyletic code as preserved eternally in the perpetually regenerating germ membrane.

Commentary
Observed comparative embryology offers myriad examples of development to consist of alternating inversions of the body morphology, most evident in the invertebrates. Notable are the many orders of insects passing through stages of egg, grub, caterpillar, imago, chrysalis, adult. The inversion cycle is abbreviated in vertebrates by the sealing of the nerve cord.

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THE EMBRYO IS THE SMALL BILATERAL SPIRAL FIGURE THAT RESULTS FROM THE GEOMETRICAL EXPANSION OF A SPHERICAL BILAYER SURFACE

The bilateral surface resists bending torque by the compression and tension of opposite sides. By this means a semi-fluid bilateral sphere will for eternity periodically turn itself inside out in the vain pursuit of mutual relief of tension and compression. The topological trajectory is, like Russian dolls, embryo-within-embryo, stacked head to foot.

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 EMBRYOGENESIS, THE BLUEPRINTS FOR GASTRULATION

You have on a face mask that is hanging under the chin. Bring it over the nose by twisting it 180 degrees so it covers the nose upside down and inside out.

1. That is how the zygoma forms from the ventral side of the parietal /temporal girdle, and why the zygomatic arch is twisted.

2. The maxilla/mandible does the same thing, originating from the ventral side of the parietal and occipital girdles, the occipital condyle and coronoid process both resulting in the parting and separation caused by the twisting of the ventral side.

3. The basioccipital is the occipital girdle after the twist. Multiple additional twists form the ethmoid and nasal structure. It is the anterior force of the basioccipital twists that form the snout, as the cause of prognathism.     

The ovoidal vertebrate blastula is segmented axially into self-organized flat rings called girdles.

Pre-larval development is the creation of the adult body by the catastrophic deformation of the blastula by a single topological event. The adult body is formed by the succession of three deformations in the reverse order of the above presentation, i.e. Basioccipital, Mandibular, Zygomatic.

These events are what happens in gastrulation, perennially invisible to the eye of science. Gastrulation is followed by the anisotropic expansion of the gastrula forming an irrelevant larval stage that fatally confuses observation.       

THE MORPHOGENETIC CODE

This model is tendered as a solution to the morphogenesis problem underlying all biological thought. The blueprints for the body are encoded in the differences in the rate of subdivision of the cells that descend from the geometrical cube formed by the first eight cells. 

Symmetrical development generates the radially symmetrical life forms of plants and radial invertebrates.

Asymmetrical development generates the embryonic spiral universal in Bilateria.

The prime mover of spiral morphogenesis is the capillary hydraulic interconnection of the cube of eight blastocysts that increases the greater at the expense of the lesser, recalling the physics experiment of two interconnected balloons.

Hence, morphogenesis is a hydrodynamic phenomenon. Morphogenesis may be defined as the solution to the eight-balloon problem. Squeeze one and you get a spiral embryo.

The hydrodynamic generation of the embryonic spiral is accompanied by the ad infinitum sequential binary fission of the elements of the system resulting in the fractal-generated spiral form of the bilateral embryo.

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 NB Re: Genes

"The genes provide timed doses of protein that maintain and occasionally modify the otherwise immutable self-organized proportions of the phyletic form.”  –– S. J. Gould       

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THE ADVENT OF AI
I Am a Contraption

“Je suis une machine"… Descartes

The advent of real artificial intelligence suggests the possibility that human consciousness is AI as well. 

The model proposed here is of a multi-layered spheroidal blastula as scaffold for the nervous system network. This complex network of interconnected cells resulting from the serial reproduction of the initial blastula bilayer membrane implies vast encipherment potential. Each of the cells in the network of cells of the living membrane is a micro-voltage electric battery, all interconnected by connective strands. 

I can be compared with the electronic pinball machine with interconnected bumpers where contact with the ball lights up a thrilling pattern of lit bumpers. To accept that you are but a bot is a premise that would be made easier if we understood how our machine works and how it is passed on intact –which science has yet to explain.  

The living pinball machine machine is a sphere, where the light patterns meet on the opposite side and reflect in complex patterns like a pebble thrown in a spherical pond. This spherical electrically-interconnected membrane of cells is a memory storage device of considerable capacity, as it records the effect of all stimuli.

Cell cleavage occurs in rounds of three, each ninety degrees from the last. This dictum of the laws of fluid dynamics causes the living membrane to reproduce itself every three cleavages. The first ball of cells, called the blastula, in its deformed guise of the embryo, ends up with eight to ten layers, the outer layer periodically jettisoned. This is the rule of growth of complex plant and animal life.

Much as an automobile mechanic understands what a car is, those who can understand the origin of the human machine can see what we are according to the principles of mechanics and biology. A multi-layer spherical pinball machine of ten interconnected layers describes a memory storage devise of immense capacity.

If an ant is a robotic machine guided by an inherited self-organized AI configuration of nerve cells, then so are you and me, since we are at the same level of complexity as insects.  

That's me.

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THE URFORM IS THE BLASTULA   

The  huge fertilized egg cell, a thousand times the size of an ordinary cell, undergoes a series of cleavages that reduce it to a thousand normal size cells, and is guided only by the laws of physics and geometry that govern the gravity-less world of bubbles where surface tension rules.  

The cleavages of the egg cell progress in rounds through the three axes of space, each ninety degrees from the last. This tripartite quantifying of the cleavage sequence generates a geometrically regular figure that is the prime mover of the symmetrical regularity that characterizes living forms. This geometrical algorithm paves the hollow sphere of the blastula with multi-layered square pyramids, visible in most higher taxa, highly visible on the backs of reptiles, notably turtles and crocodiles.

Tripartite cleavage generates a pattern of square pyramids by simple mechanical steps.  In the geometrical sequence of tripartite cleavage, the first two divisions create a square of four cells, paving the sphere of the blastocoel with squares. The third division of the sequence causes the membrane of squares to reproduce itself, forming a bilayer of concentric spheres of equal number of cells, the outer layer under tension and the inner layer under compression, causing the cells of the outer layer to separate from each other like dots on an inflating balloon or the expanding universe.  The inclination of the vertical axis of the square pyramid generates the spiny forms of scutes, scales, and feathers. The most complete version of this geometrical figure is in the turtle shell, which is the blastula preserved in full-scale enlargement, a field of square pyramids crowded onto the dorsal side. 

The vertebrate body originates from a bilayer blastula, with the outer layer forming the shell and the inner layer of the vertebrate musculoskeletal system. In most vertebrates the dorsal shell pattern is absent or vestigial, with the exception of turtles and armadillos. The turtle shell is its own blastula, compressed to the dorsal side. 

In all taxa the blastula bursts and recoils in the event called gastrulation which forms the embryo, a bilaterally symmetrical spiral of pairs of cells, the shriveled deflated remnant of the blastula, maintaining the geometry of the blastula. The catastrophic embryonic deformation that shapes the embryo is irrelevant to the underlying form retained of the blastula Urform.

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FROM EGG TO EMBRYO BY BALLOON

The fertilized egg cell subdivides the way we cut an orange.

Two cuts at ninety degrees makes four quarters. A third cut at ninety degrees to the others creates a cube of orange eighths.

Likewise, all fertilized eggs sequentially split in two through the three axes of space, in compliance with the mechanics of bubble geometry. The gravity-less world of bubbles and foam is ruled by surface tension that causes bubbles to cling tenaciously together like orphans in a storm. When each of the first eight embryonic cells each go a round of three binary fissions, sixty-four cells are now vying for the same space.  The ensuing crush creates a linear, bilateral symmetrical spiral configuration we call the embryo, virtually identical in fish, frog, dog, and human. 

Within this oversimplification of embryogenesis are the remarkable properties of lipid membranes that enclose the cytoplasm and account for tricks and shortcuts the cells learn, doing the same thing three times a day for a hundred million years. The incontrovertible laws of mechanics and the rules of the geometry of space create the same figure each time–that of a linear, bilaterally symmetrical spiral.

The subdividing mass of cells forms a spheroidal balloon called the blastula. In all animal life the balloon bursts, producing the limp deflated membrane which is the embryo.

Development is the inflation of the embryo.

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How is the complex animal or plant body formed from a single cell? This has remained one of the greatest unsolved questions confronting science since Aristotle dissected duck eggs around 300 BC. Now, in the first quarter of the 21st century, after 70 years of the application of the theories of natural selection and genetic inheritance, there remains no causative, coherent, graphical answer to this question. 

The science of chemistry, consisting of the study of how the elements behave and conjoin, was rationalized by Robert Boyle, Lord Cavendish, Lavoisier, Dalton, Mendeleef, and Niels Bohr. The laws of physics were set down early on by Isaac Newton. Physics and chemistry are guided by laws, not theories. Students of biology may not realize that the science of biology has not undergone this process of rationalization. It is not an overstatement to say that biologists today still do not understand how biology works. Evolutionary biologists do not know the mechanism of evolution. Developmental biologists have no idea how the embryo is formed in a matter of hours from a single cell. Zoologists have no idea how the complex animals that appeared half a billion years ago got their shapes. Anatomists since Leonardo da Vinci and Vesalius can describe in great detail every one of the 200 bones of the human skeleton but have no idea where their shapes come from. The steps of the evolution of man from fish are accurately described by paleontologists, but no one knows where the fish got its shape in the first place. Darwin gave a plausible account for the changing of the shapes of the beaks of finches but no explanation for the beak, no less the finch itself.  

This state of affairs exists partly because of an unusual scientific occurrence in the 1940’s when the so-called Modern Synthesis was—at the suggestion of a handful of respected and influential biologists—cobbled together as the official dogma of biological origins, virtually relegating the study of embryology to the birthing of babies. 

Commencing at the end of the 18th century and the advent of advanced microscopes, the German Naturphilosophen, or transcendental zoologists, led by Immanuel Kant, Lorenz Oken and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, followed by Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Richard Owen, observed the steps of embryogenesis in the reasonable expectation of discovering how the body is derived. These scientists were followed by such pioneers of embryology as Von Baer, Haeckel, Gegenbaur, Gotte, Müller, Hatschek, Köllike, Fol, Lankester and His. Francis Maitland Balfour’s encyclopaedic A Treatise on Comparative Embryology (Balfour, 1880) describes the detailed embryology of most of the dozens of different phyla. Balfour characterizes embryology thus:

“The embryological record... is both imperfect and misleading. It may be compared to an ancient manuscript with many of the sheets lost, others displaced, and with spurious passages interpolated by a later hand. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature to attain her ends by the easiest means. The time and sequence of the development of parts is often modified, and finally, secondary structural features make their appearance to fit the embryo or larva for special conditions of existence. When the life history of a form is fully known, the most difficult part of his task is still before the scientific embryologist. Like the scholar with his manuscript, the embryologist has, by a process of careful and critical examination to determine where the gaps are present, to detect later insertions, and to place in order what has been misplaced.”

The following is excerpted from The Intellectual Observer, Vol. II, 1863. (p. 98):

“… every day, every hour, the scene changes, and this instability effects essential as well as necessary, parts, etc. . . Here cavities partition themselves into distinct chambers, or extend themselves into canals; and these, in their turn, are filled up and converted into ligaments; films are rolled up into tubes; isolated parts solder themselves together into continuous organs, or uniform masses divide themselves and form several organs. At the same time, relations and proportions change each instant. Parts which had been almost confounded, separate and become strangers; others, which had been separated, approach and contract intimate union. Organs with temporary functions, grow, increase rapidly, acquire an enormous size, and then become atrophied, and disappear. Others stop at a given moment, while all grows around them. They retain their place, and will be found in the adult, where they have no other apparent part than to bear witness to a state of things which no longer exists.” 

Watching the dizzying complexity of the process of embryology is not the same thing as understanding the logic behind what is happening. The cells seem to run about helter-skelter, organizing themselves into organs as though they knew in advance where to go, all to the utter confusion of embryologists. Balfour observed that cells seem to use the shortest path to their destination regardless of the logic implicit in the inheritance of the process pursued by their forebears.   

Progress was made in the late 19th century by the school of Entwicklungsmechanik (developmental mechanics), which included Wilhelm His, father of human embryology and inventor of the microtome, who made models of organs from inflated bladders and wax tubes to demonstrate how the organs can be formed by mechanical organization. At the end of that century experimental embryologist Wilhelm Roux discovered mosaic development, showing that the deletion of one of the first few divided cells of a salamander resulted in a creature lacking parts of its body. On the other hand, a few years later, Hans Driesch found that any one of the first few cells of the sea urchin could alone produce a complete creature by what he called “regulative development.” To the confusion of embryologists, these contradictory observations remain unresolved. Driesch finally came to espouse the mystical living principle of Entelechy proposed by Aristotle.  

The rediscovery of the laws of Mendel and the identity of the genetic molecules set the stage for the theory of neoDarwinism, also called the Modern Synthesis. The Modern Synthesis presumed that the DNA molecule contained a blueprint for the body. When the vast structure of DNA was revealed in 1952, everyone (including this author) believed that it could encode anything. Embryology was over. Genetics reigned. 

But decades have passed with no results. Great minds like Richard Lewontin, Brian Goodwin and Stephen Jay Gould disputed the neo-Darwinist theory. Now, few evolutionary biologists still believe in any creative effect of natural selection. It is no longer a consensus that form is encoded in the genes. Biology is left again with no laws and no plausible theory. In 2008 16 prominent biologists, dubbed  “the Altenberg 16,” met in Altenberg, Austria, to reconsider the Modern Synthesis. Nothing conclusive was proposed. Denis Noble et al. organized a website called The Third Way including a roster of 50 biologists seeking non-Darwinian accounts of evolution. While natural selection is now widely declared to act not alone but in partnership with other phenomena, generally called self-organization, no one has identified a mechanism for self-organization.

We have proposed embryo geometry as a unique mechanism of evolution and the origin of complex biological form. And we have demonstrated a plausible hypothetical mechanical model of embryological gastrulation that predicts the structure of the archetypal vertebrate body form with absolute geometrical congruence with observed biology.  We claim a unique solution in the apparent absence of any other claim extant in the literature.

Mathematics recognizes proof. Science does not.

The Pythogorans wondered about the relationship among the sides and hypotenuse of right triangles. Pythagoras suggested a2+b2=c2. Although this guess has so far correctly predicted the structure of every triangle tested, it is not a proof. The proof to the Pythagorean theorem is a separate complicated matter. 

Science recognizes the unobservable or the historical as scientific fact when based on overwhelming evidence, like a2+b2=c2. Evolution is an example of accepted yet unprovable scientific fact. So is the Big Bang and plate techtonics.  

Biology, the State of the Art

Thousands of biologists worldwide are trying to figure out how life got started and how it evolved into the millions of species of plants and animals we see today. The origin and evolution of life is the subject of study in all universities and the vast network of astrobiology organizations funded by the U.S. government. Dozens of special institutions are dedicated to finding the answers to the following questions:

• How did the first living cell come about? How did the first cell lead to the complex forms of animal and plant life that appeared half a billion years ago?

• How did these forms evolve as today’s millions of species, including Humans?

• How is the complex animal and plant formed in each generation from a single cell?

• How the first complex animals of the Cambrian era 450 million years ago were formed from the first cell remains a mystery.

• How the fertilized egg cell produces the embryo in a matter of hours is also a mystery. The idea that the form of a body is encoded in the genes has turned out to be false.

• It is agreed that the first cell was a self-replicating genetic chemical entrapped within a double-walled membrane of lipid molecules. Much is known about RNA and lipid bilayer membranes. The latter can be synthesized in the laboratory. How the first complex RNA molecule came about is unknown.

Misunderstanding Genes 

The science of genetics is of great value in certain realms. For instance, it is the basis for great achievements in medicine. Genetic engineering has revolutionized agriculture. Evolutionary biology has benefited from the ability of genetic analysis to establish ancestral relationships among species. But the role of DNA as the blueprint of life, that is, the guiding force that shapes the body, has not been discovered. For decades now, geneticists have conceded that the genes manufacture the proteins that make up the body but have no role in the process of assembly. The genes appear to influence body chemistry, not body architecture. The manufacture of melanin can result in the inheritance of blue or brown eyes, but not the structure of the eye. Many genes are now understood to act as switches that instigate action of other genes in the effect called “cascades,” which finally produce an organ. The elimination of certain genes prevents the formation of a given organ. But this does not mean that the gene shaped the organ, any more than a lamp switch creates light. The action of genes has never been associated with the production of a shape or form. The science of limb development has never produced an image of a bone or muscle. These discouraging facts, however, have not dissuaded thousands of geneticists in continuing the funded search for the formation of body forms from genetic “blueprints.” 

The role of the genes is characterized by the principle of heterochrony, as discussed in Ontogeny and Phylogeny by Stephen Jay Gould (Gould, 1977). The genes provide the materials of construction of the body in precise quantities at precisely timed intervals, thus maintaining, and occasionally changing the proportions of the otherwise immutable phyletic body form. Natural selection chooses variants resulting from changes in the proportions of the immutable phyletic form, rather than from random genetic mutations. 

Richard Lewontin makes the following commentary in It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (Lewontin, 2000):

“In the middle and later part of the nineteenth century, in the service of medicine, a great deal was learned about the physiology of microorganisms and vertebrates, but the only large project of biological research that was self-consciously designed to bring the living world into congruence with the mechanistic principles developed for the inanimate world was in the study of embryology. The intellectual program of the German school of Entwicklungsmechanik was to provide an entirely mechanical explanation for the mysterious and seemingly goal-directed process of the development of a highly differentiated adult organism from a single cell. 

This program, unfulfilled, continues to give form to a large part of modern biology. Two major domains remain to be satisfactorily included within the mechanist program. One, ironically, is the very problem that nineteenth-century biology took to be the major challenge for a mechanistic science of life, the problem of the development of form. A great deal is known about the genes that encode various chemical signals in development and about how the network of signals is hooked up, but we do not have the faintest idea about how all of this is turned into the shape of my nose.”

Yet the modern synthesis still prevails as the basis for funded research. It is taught to students despite the warning given by Dr. Vladimir L. Voeikov, Chair of Bioorganic Chemistry, Moscow State University, that, “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.” Biologists are reluctant to broadcast the failure of natural selection to account for evolution. Creationists know this, and boldly declare in a blatant non sequitur that the failure of natural selection to explain evolution is due to the fact that evolution never occurred. 

Mechanical Induction  

In a series of elegantly simple demonstrations, using advanced micromanipulating and observational techniques, physicist Emmanuel Farge (Farge, 2003) showed conclusively that simple distortive mechanical pressure on the embryonic cell is not only a sufficient condition, but also a necessary condition for gene expression. The theory of genetic control of cell division and evolution by random selection cannot be reconciled with the evidence of Farge’s demonstration.  

Farge induced gene expression in Drosophila egg cells by subjecting them to mechanical pressure. He then found that normal gene expression occurring in cells under pressure is blocked if the pressure is relieved artificially. In a third demonstration he restored pressure and observed that gene expression was restored as well. 

The Farge discovery supports the theory that the embryo is formed by undirected, step-by-step expansion of the tissue of cells. Cell division and gene expression are seen as concurrent results of a third effect, deformations in the membrane caused by cell crowding. Farge describes how catenin, torn loose from inside the membrane, heads for the nucleus where it instigates gene expression and cell division. Gene expression provides each daughter cell with growth factor to restore its full size. Increased crowding initiates another cycle in a self-propagating feedback loop. Cell-crowding causes distortion, causes cell division, causes gene expression, causes cell growth, causes Farge has demonstrated that mechanical force is a necessary as well as sufficient condition for gene expression in early Drosophila embryology. It follows that genes do not direct cell division. The fly’s body form is not encoded in the genes. This refutes the widespread belief that the genome encodes shape. The genes make proteins that stimulate the growth of the cell pairs resulting from the division of the deformed cells that comprise naturally occurring cell crowding patterns. The body makes the genes, not vice versa. The genome is a recording of historical developmental events, played back as a guide in each generation. The premise that gene expression and cell division are both consequences of a third affect, that of mechanical induction, is the mechanism for this present model of development. 

The Missing First Act of the Embryology Mystery Play 

Embryologists will immediately recognize that the steps presented in this model differ from those of observed embryology. These differences are partly accounted for by the phenomenon called condensation, described in Stephen Jay Gould’s seminal work, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), which describes evolution as the continuing addition of terminal stages to the steps of embryology, and the concurrent condensation and eventual disappearance of the initial stages. The single-cell amoeba replicates itself by alternately growing and splitting in two, each half immediately inheriting any new characters that may have been acquired by experience in the environment. Sonneborn, in a famous experiment, surgically inverted a patch of cilia on a single cell protozoan, and observed that the feature was inherited through many generations (Sonneborn, 1962). In this process the record of the antecedent evolutionary form is lost. Observed embryology is like seeing the second act of a mystery play. This essay is the hypothetical reconstruction of the first act.  

We hypothesize that the convolutions of observed embryological development are elaborations on the basic pattern we have identified. A mismatch between the theoretical and the observed is a difficulty of the model we present here. An important facet of future progress in the evolutionary sciences will be evaluating the nature of these differences, namely, elucidating the differences between act one and act two of the metaphorical mystery play.  The paleontological record will be of considerable importance in this effort because it records stages in the elaboration of form at earlier and presumably less complex degrees of condensation. Evolutionary biology, like cosmology, geology and history, seeks hypothetical constructions of missing antecedent stages that predict the observed later stages.  The embryologist is left to observe the illusion of the formation of the embryo directed by invisible three-dimensional vectorial fields. These were historically named morphogenetic fields, for which, hitherto, no account of their origin is recorded in the literature. 

Natural Selection 

Natural selection is the term, in the phrase utilized by Stephen Jay Gould, for the universal “headsman” responsible for the death of every individual who does not live long enough to reproduce, and for all species extinctions. The selective extinctions of species is based on the failure of some species to adapt to the environment in favor of species whose variations by chance render survival favorable, for example, by the possession of limbs instead of fins. Natural selection acts on variants in the body proportions of the immutable phyletic body forms, rather than on random genetic mutations. The origin of the phyletic forms, for example, molluscan, crustacean, vertebrate, and insect, is generally and lamentably unknown to science.

Natural selection is to Nature as car buyers are to the design of the automobile. Inventors and manufacturers flood the market with products and a superfluity of variants on existing products without consulting the potential buyers. The buyers determine which of them will remain in business. 

Darwin observed what dog breeders have made of the wolf, and plausibly extrapolated the idea to the rest of nature. He ignored the fact that all dogs are variants of one model, and did not address the question as to where the wolf came form. Nor did he ask where the beak of the finch came from no less the bird itself. Darwin did not even know the source of variations which natural selection acted on. So he invented Gemmules, out of thin air, on the basis that science progresses by thin air hypotheses such as evolution itself. Evolution was right. But no gemmules were found. In desperation, in the 1940’s, a well meaning group of prominent scientists possessed with the excitement of the discovery of what looked like a code in the genetic molecules declared that evolution must be the natural selection of mutations caused by random errors in the code. They called this the Modern Synthesis, or Standard Evolutionary Theory, also known as neo-Darwinism.  This dogma has prevailed since then like the science equivalent of the Bible and Koran combined. When it finally became clear that there is no code in DNA it was too late.  Funded research and the biology academic infrastructure depend on this too-big-to-fail theory. The Modern Synthesis, or neo-Darwinism, is the most pernicious error to befall science since creationism and Aristotle. The ideas in this essay are an apostasy and have been treated as such with comparable severity by editors and other guardians of the dogma.   

Biology and Philosophy, the Myth of Biodiversity 

For 50 years, biologists have informed philosophers that the human body and the rest of nature is shaped by pure chance, like a hand at poker, humans having been dealt four aces.  Yet any thoughtful taxonomist knows that out of endless possibilities, there are only two kinds of living forms—radial and bilateral—the millions of species being merely slight differences in proportion. Plants and radial animals are a vase with a radial array of tentacles or petals emerging from the top; the bilaterals are a segmented tube with pairs of pointed limbs attached to the bottom of each segment. Goethe was not fooled. That the human body is an artifact of geometry is a profound philosophical concept.  

There is only one kind of eye—a sphere with a lens and light-sensitive sheets of cells attached to the brain. There is only one kind of flower—all consisting of a stamen, stigma, pistil, anthers, petals, sepals etc. There is only one kind of bilateral animal. The bodies of worms, insects, crustaceans, and vertebrates, all consisting of two concentric segmented cylinders with an anterior head, paired dorsal eyes, a ventral mouth, an alimentary canal, paired, pointed, jointed, hollow, ventral limbs, and identical territorial and sexual behaviors. Thus, humans, flies, and octopi have the same kind of eye. A sunflower is the morphological equivalent of a pansy. The worm, grasshopper, lobster, and bird have the same body plan. Biodiversity is merely the variation of a single body plan of bilateral and radial animals and plants. Beyond these severe constraints, the myriad imaginable possibilities of three-dimensional shapes that life might assume are left to science fiction and cartoonists.

Evolution Rethink 

Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? This is the title of point/counterpoint articles by Kevin Laland et al. and Gregory A. Wray, Hopi E. Hoekstra et al., respectively, in the October 9, 2014, issue of Nature, headlining the 500-pound gorilla in the biology lab—the failure of the neo-Darwinist theory, the mainstay dogma of biology since the 1950’s—leaving biology with no theory to explain how life originates, evolves, and is formed from the egg. Still, it is a gross understatement of the catastrophe that has beset the science of biology that has now been told that it has been barking up the wrong tree for half a century.

Since the discovery of the structure of DNA, biology has been subject to the dogma known as the Modern Synthesis, aka neo-Darwinism, which holds that life is directed by the selection of random genetic mutations, based on the belief that DNA is the blueprint of life. It has now been determined that DNA merely makes proteins but has nothing to do with how they are assembled. Biological research for 50 years has been a race to decode a non-existent message in the genes. 

The call to rethink the mechanism for evolution is like chemists being asked to rethink the periodic table. What is being rethought is the very role of genes. Failure to discover a genetic code has left biology at square one—a purely descriptive science, lacking in laws which govern its functioning. While chemistry students spend four years learning the laws worked out for them by their forebears, biology students learn the phenomena of biology to prepare them to help work out the laws that govern them. 

The Nature article describes the population of biologists as a two-party system, the parties mutually unfriendly, the issues ideological and political rather than scientific. The knowledge that there is no code in DNA has not stopped the billion-dollar, too big to fail, genetic research industry, nor to teach an obsolete theory to incoming students. The attempts to amend the dogma are called the “extended evolutionary synthesis,” a model first proposed at the 2008 Alternberg Meeting.

“The mere mention of EES (extended evolutionary synthesis) evokes an emotional, even hostile reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often vital discussions descend into acrimony with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the specter of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science. Some might fear they will receive less funding and recognition if outsiders–such as physiologists or developmental biologists flood into their field.”

Said Nature article also makes reference to the website The Third Way. Some 50 prominent scientists are listed who reject the neo-Darwinist account of biology. In an absence of unanimity they each have an idea of what is right. Neo-Darwinism was proclaimed a failure by Stephen Jay Gould as early as the 1970’s. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn has stated that an old, false paradigm will not be discarded until a new one is at hand.  

The State of the Art of the Origin of Life 

Like mechanical technology biology deals with tangible entities, namely the bodies that are manufactured by its processes. If those processes were understood, then, like engineers, biologists would produce blueprints starting with cells, showing how the body is constructed from them. Instead, embryologists, in awestruck incomprehension, record in drawings and photographs of every step they see in the subdivision of the egg and the rearrangement of the resulting cells to form the body like mobile pieces in a self-assembling jigsaw puzzle. Nature left a complete set of fossils from fish to man to tantalize evolutionary biologists by not telling them how the complex body of the fish got there in the first place.

If only fortuitous accidents survived then there would be only one, or just a few, species instead of millions. The fossil record is not littered with failed anomalies, only a straight line of extinct species. The three-dozen phyla each contain thousands, and in some cases, millions, of different species. The simple, plausible idea of nature acting like a dog breeder captivated the Victorian world, but was soon dismissed as only partially effective by all, including Darwin himself.  

The biological science establishment, consisting of the teaching institutions, academic societies, peer-reviewed journals and government funding agencies are staffed by personnel who have learned a biology based on the dogma of the Modern Synthesis, taught by professors who themselves were brought up in this mode of thought. Hundreds of academic laboratories are funded yearly in the hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct research based on the theory that the DNA molecule encodes the blueprint for the making of the body, and that the present code is the result of fortuitous, random errors accumulated over eons as selected by the environment. But after half a century of code cracking, no code has ever been found and few evolutionary biologists or theoreticians still believe there is one. 

If there were a code in the genes for the body, then it would be possible for images of parts of it to be printed out of a computer. But there is no software to compute the information. The reaction-diffusion theory proposed by Alan Turing in the 1950’s suggests that the genes make chemicals on two sides of the body that converge toward the middle, where they combine to form an organ. Using this process, Turing demonstrated that he could print the simple pattern of the French tricolor flag. Although the researchers in vertebrate limb development have made attempts, no image has ever been produced by the reaction- diffusion system, which remains nothing but a useless thought experiment.  

Geneticists now know that genes make proteins but have yet to demonstrate their role in assembling them. This process is left to unspecified processes referred to as self-organization. 

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and On Growth and Form 

In 1998, I made a poster presentation in Dundee, Scotland, at a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the death of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) in which I demonstrated the similarity of the aster and spindle configuration accompanying cell division with the general shape of the multi-cellular organism. It attracted little attention.  

D’Arcy, as he is called, summarized centuries of investigation into the origin of living form in his widely acclaimed, 1,100 page-tome, On Growth and Form (Thompson, 1992). The 1960 Nobel Laureate, Peter Medewar, called the book, “the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.”  

D’Arcy’s most famous work, On Growth and Form, was written in Dundee, mostly in 1915, though wartime shortages and D’Arcy’s many last-minute alterations delayed publication until 1917. The central theme of On Growth and Form is that biologists of its author’s day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and underemphasized the roles of physical laws and mechanics. He advocated structuralism as an alternative to survival of the fittest in governing the form of species.  

On the concept of allometry, Thompson wrote:

“An organism is so complex a thing, and growth so complex a phenomenon, that for growth to be so uniform and constant in all the parts as to keep the whole shape unchanged would indeed be an unlikely and an unusual circumstance. Rates vary, proportions change, and the whole configuration alters accordingly.”  

Thompson pointed to example after example of correlation between biological forms and mechanical phenomena. He showed similarity in the forms of jellyfish and drops of liquid falling into viscous fluid, and between the internal supporting structures in the hollow bones of birds and well known engineering truss designs. His observations of phyllotaxis (numerical relationships between spiral structures in plants) and the Fibonacci sequence have become a textbook staple.  

Perhaps the most famous part of the work is chapter XVII: “The Comparison of Related Forms,” where Thompson explores the degree to which differences in the forms of related animals could be described by means of relatively simple mathematical transformations. 

On Growth and Form is an encyclopedic presentation of centuries of investigation into the origins of living form. D’Arcy deplored its wholesale abandonment in favor of the Modern Synthesis, which attributes form to the selection by the environment of random mutations. D’Arcy saw the complex body as a holistic unity comprising a network of interconnected cells generated by the body rather than the other way around. His summary is expressed in the conclusion of the 60-page chapter, “The Form and Structure of the Cell” (pp. 344-345): 

“Hofmeister and Sachs have taught us that in the plant the growth of the mass, the growth of the organ, is the primary fact, that “cell formation is a phenomenon very general in organic life, but still only of secondary significance.” “Comparative embryology,” says Whitman, reminds us at every turn that the organism dominates cell-formation, using for the same purpose one, several, or many cells, massing its material and directing its movements and shaping its organs, as if cells did not exist.” So Rauber declared that, in the whole world of organisms, “das Ganze liefert die Theile, nicht die Theile das Ganze: letzteres setzt die Theile zusammen, nicht diese jenes.” (The whole makes the parts, not the other way around.) And on the botanical side De Bary has summed up the matter in an aphorism, “Die Pflanze bildet Zellen, nicht die Zelle bildet Pflanzen.” (Plants make cells, cells don’t make plants, author). Discussed almost wholly from the concrete, or morphological point of view, the question has for the most part been made to turn on whether actual protoplasmic continuity can be demonstrated between one cell and another, whether the organism be an actual reticulum, or syncytium. But from the dynamical point of view the question is much simpler. We then deal not with material continuity, not with little bridges of connecting protoplasm, but with a continuity of forces, a comprehensive field of force, which runs through and through the entire organism and is by no means restricted in its passage to a protoplasmic continuum. And such a continuous field of force, somehow shaping the whole organism, independently of the number, magnitude and form of the individual cells, which enter like a froth into its fabric, seems to me certainly and obviously to exist. As Whitman says, “the fact that physiological unity is not broken by cell-boundaries is confirmed in so many ways that it must be accepted as one of the fundamental truths of biology.”

Plasticity, Teratology and the Blueprint for the Body 

Life forms are essentially plastic, depending on the environment in which they develop. Bodies resemble each otheronly if the environments during development are identical as they are in the womb or in the bud. Otherwise, root systems are adventitious, as are trees in an orchard. Gardeners and topiary artists are therefore able to impose their creative ideas of form on nature.  Only the flowers are alike. Animals are alike because the womb conditions are usually identical. Yet conjoined twins occur. What are the genes for the unique specialized musculo-skeletal features that occur in these cases? Where is the evolution that presumably produces two-headed calves and turtles? 

Plasticity, Self-Organization and Evolution 

Plasticity is the term describing the capacity of organisms to alter their normal form in response to change in mechanical or chemical influences. Plants are notably plastic in form. The shapes of root systems depend mostly on soil conditions. Branch systems in trees are partly random and may be artificially shaped by gardeners. No two trees in an orchard are identical. In trees and shrubs the flowers are identical because they are generated in the protective environment of the bud. Similarly, animals assume identical adult forms only if the conditions of growth are identical, which is the case in the protective environment of the womb. Experimental embryology teaches that the slightest mechanical insult at an early stage will produce an anomaly. The landmark experiments of the pioneer experimental embryologists Driesch and Roux around 1900 demonstrated the strong effects on the adult animal of the excision or mechanical deformation of one or more of the first eight cells from the subdivision of the egg. 

The capacity for plasticity and regeneration are nearly 100% in the simplest animals and in the early stages of embryogenesis of complex animals. High school biology demonstrates the regeneration of the missing halves of bisected flatworms. These capacities disappear with phyletic complexity. These These facts belie the theory that form is under the control of the genes.  

Experience tells us that complex objects such as houses and cars have been made step-by-step by intelligent intervention. A tornado in a junkyard has little chance of accidentally assembling a car. This reasoning has led Creationists to believe that every stage in the assembly of the embryo is guided by a supernatural intelligence, citing the unfathomable complexity of life as proof there is a God.  Biologists have come to presume that the creation of complex life is guided step-by-step by a code in the genes, but have been frustrated in their inability ever to find such a code. Besides Divine or genetic intervention, there is a third possibility called Self-Organization, the theory that the living organism, no matter how complicated, is generated each time simply by the stacking of cells as they multiply, beginning with the division of the egg.  

Some highly patterned features such as the geometrically perfect mollusk shells and the regular patterns on their surfaces can easily be attributed to mathematically timed generation of the material of their construction without the need for guidance in every square millimeter. Likewise, pine cones, the spiral centers of sunflowers and the patterns on snakes. That these occur in identical form in all individuals without step- by-step guidance is not too hard to conceive. Perfect inorganic crystals achieve large size without error, based merely on the way the first molecules stack. All grocers make the same pyramid of oranges with no formal training.  

The sphere is a common self-organized figure, from soap bubbles to planets. Another example is the egg. Its surface consists of identical phospholipid molecules that line up in regular rows and columns. All eggs of the same species may be presumed identical. Upon fertilization the egg is divided in two, four, and eight cells, which may array themselves in natural, geometric configurations. The formation of the thousand-cell ball of the blastula, and its subsequent internally directed inversion during gastrulation, may also follow an accurately repeated succession of events. That these events have been going on every few hours or days for millions of years can guarantee their precise repetition. Even organogenesis, the formation of the body plan and the embryonic organs, which emerge as sheets of cells are churned and deformed during gastrulation, is not inconceivable considering the repetition over ages of the simple stacking of dividing cells the same way in each generation, beginning simply and adding steps at the end from time to time. 

Embryologists make “fate maps” that trace the path of each cell from egg to embryo. While the general body form is outlined by this method, unfortunately, gaps and discontinuities in the delineation of the organs belie the idea that the complexity of the embryo can be traced entirely to the predictable deformation of the tissue. This deficiency in the self-organization process is attributed by geneticists to the guidance of an unknown genetic code. But the shortcuts can also be accounted for by the embryological process of condensation, the loss of initial stages over time, and the maintenance of the original pattern of the egg membrane as a morphogenetic field. Moreover, the process is maintained by the genes that provide the materials of construction in exact doses at precisely timed intervals in the process called heterochrony.

Thus embryogenesis by self-organization is plausible even in highly complex configurations like the human body, since it comes into being only after hundreds of millions of years of repetitions of steps of ever increasing complexity. Errors occur easily. Most are aborted. Some manage to mature to adulthood as freaks of nature, or teratologies. Evolution is the result of changes in the timing that produce changes in the proportions of the otherwise immutable body plan (Gould, 1977). 

Themes and Variations 

The theme and variation is a classical form of musical composition used by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and others.Usually the theme is a simple tune set out at the beginning and sometimes repeated in its pure form at the end. Biodiversity is the millions of variations on a tune that is never played, and which no one has ever figured out. The variations are in many cases extreme, the result of millions of years of distortions. Yet nature does not allow departure from the classical form by forbidding notes that are not in the tune, that is why we can always recognize life when we see it. There are no animals shaped like a piano, scissors, a pretzel, a cube, a spoon, a pyramid, a comb, a lawnmower, a violin, chair, or a table. All the millions of species of insects have six legs, all the thousands of lobster, crab and crayfish species have 10, and all the spiders eight. There is never a single exception to this constraint.  

Biodiversity is demonstrated only in variation in the proportion of otherwise immutable phyletic body-plan, of which there are still almost the same three dozen that first appeared in the Cambrian era 500 million years ago, and why it is so easy for science fiction illustrators to invent bizarre creatures.  

Biodiversity Revisited 

Species go extinct for being insupportable by the environment. But zoology teaches that the mutations offered for selection are far from random. Animal breeders select for traits among litters that provide ample variety, but are limited always to variations in the proportion of the parts of the pre-existing, otherwise immutable body form—shorter legs, bigger ears, no tails, long hair, stubby noses, large size, small size, etc.—never by any new organs. Similarly, evolution in nature proceeds by the natural selection of mutants that vary only in the proportion of the parts of their body that were definitively determined when the three dozen individual phyletic forms—vertebrates, insects, arachnids, crustaceans, etc.—were separately originated with four, six, eight or ten legs. All 10 million species of insects have six legs, a head, thorax, abdomen, eyes, antennae, mouth, etc. Paleontology offers no evidence of a common ancestor of the few dozen known phyla. That there are so many thousands of similar species in so many of the genera belies the idea that extinction is a necessary condition for new speciation. In a lush, ample environment new species could conceivably arise without natural selection. This may well have been the case in the so-called Cambrian explosion when in the relatively brief period of a few million years, 450 million years ago, all the present phyla came into existence at once. No substantially new ones have appeared since.  

The premise that all animal life derives from the same simple surface may at first seem inconsistent with the idea of biodiversity, which implies a vast panoply of animal species of different forms and shapes. In fact, nature has provided only two forms for the complex animal body—the radial and the bilateral.  

Radial animals—jellyfish, octopi, etc.—are sacks with radiating tentacles. The bilaterals—including vertebrates, insects and crustaceans—are only somewhat more complicated. Their common design is a segmented tube with pairs of transverse, jointed limbs, a nerve cord connected to a pair of eyes up front with a pair of horns or antennae above, an alimentary canal with an anterior mouth fed by the first pair of limbs, an identical copulatory and reproduction system and even the same territorial behavior.  

Biodiversity consists only of variations on these two themes. Nature apparently never tried anything else. The evidence of natural selection is at the superficial levels of beaks of finches and peppered moth wings. Since flies, lobsters and humans are of the same general architectural plan, it is not difficult to imagine each of them originating from a common source. Goethe, recognizing this, dedicated his scientific life in the pursuit of a common denominator of form he called the Urform. 

Adaptation 

The primary principle of evolution by natural selection is called Adaptation, where the organism is presumed to constantly produce mutations and where those best suited for the environment survive. Indeed, at a superficial level, many examples occur to exemplify and verify this principle. Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches changed beak length with the change in the shape of flowers. Darker moths survive by camouflage as tree trunks become sooty in smoky industrial areas, just as animals that by camouflage as tree trunks become sooty in smoky industrial areas, just as animals that by chance have white fur survive in the snow. But below this literally superficial level adaptation and natural selection are not demonstrated. The phenomena that can change the proportions of the beak do not produce the beak, no less the finch, the moth or the polar bear.  

Nature seems to effect inevitable changes that the organism learns to live with or else become extinct. As an example, the limbs of the tetrapod vertebrates have nominally five joints: elbow, wrist and three knuckles. Yet animals of the plains, forests or mountains may walk the same terrain on their toes, palms, wrists or forelegs, whether cat, horse, goat or kangaroo. In some animals the forelimbs are a pair of bones and in others the two are fused. The presence of claws or fingers and toenails is rarely correlated with their use. As useful as prehensile fingers may seem, they occur only in primates. Squirrels may clutch nuts but dogs can hold things only in their mouths. The way cats transport their young is a travesty of design. Few other species can move their young at all. The list of special features for survival that naturalists love to demonstrate is in the hundreds. However cunning some of them are, though—for example, carnivorous plants or anglerfish—why are they confined to a just a few species? 

Apparently evolution is not directed toward certain uses, but uses are put into play to utilize the modifications. Certain dinosaurs developed flat, feathered forelimbs for no apparent reason. Some finally flew, while some never could. Of what use are wings to the ostrich?  

Natural design may be better understood by the principle that the organism experiences changes in the proportions of the parts of its body and then adapts new uses for the modified organ. To see organisms as perfectly designed for their environmental niche is an illusion. The opposite may well be happening. Changes in the organisms are inconvenient or lethal. The organism finds a new environment where the new modification is tolerable, or else it goes extinct. To escape predation caused by their useless feet, seals and walruses must jump in the water or die.  

Changes experienced by organisms are the result of the evolutionary phenomenon called Heterochrony, where the timing of the actions of the genes changes the rate of embryological development of an organ. Humans are the result of the retarded development of the ape ancestor by the process called Neoteny (Gould, 1977).  

Noted philosopher Jerry Fodor and biologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, authors of What Darwin Got Wrong (Fodor, 2010), dismiss adaptation as a principle of natural selection. Their book, widely reviewed, has mainly received condemnation of its ideas. The reviewers have almost all been geneticists, whose lifetime belief system depends on natural selection by environmental adaptation.  

The criticism of adaptationist thinking is that its proponents feel obligated to assign survival value to every feature discussed. The underlying idea leads to the absurdity that every organ of the organism is perfectly adapted because all variants of it have been tried and rejected, for which there is no evidence.

Directed Evolution 

In the evolution from fish to man the proportion of the size of the head to the entire body increases. Fish have proportionally small heads, reptiles larger, mammals even larger yet, primates and man largest. Concurrently the spinal chord begins straight and proceeds to develop a semi-circular curve from the straight fish spine to the to hunchback spine of mammals and man. Conversely, the embryo, in its development, moves in the opposite direction. The early embryonic head occupies half the body mass and becomes smaller with adulthood. The spine begins with the “embryonic curl,” which substantially straightens out by birth. 

These facts seem to provide a direction for vertebrate evolution. A geometric cause can be provided by the hypothesis that the embryo develops from the surface of a spherical egg. Embryonic growth and development occur concurrently. The gradual retardation of development, and the acceleration of growth over evolutionary time, can account for these morphological vectors. The human adult is an overgrown juvenile ape. The causes may have to do with the increasing availability of nourishment that may accelerate growth.  

The Mystery of Embryogenesis 

The comparison of the steps of early embryology of diverse species shows no consistent pattern. A universal event is Gastrulation, which may be described as the partial entry of one part of the blastula into its own interior, at a point or along a line. There is a multitude of different ways this occurs in nature, all leading to the same result—the adult form. There are species that maintain a choice of more than one possible type of gastrulation. Embryologists observe cells moving about helter-skelter, but ending up in a seemingly predetermined arrangement, the embryo.  

Insect eggs do not undergo cleavage yet display the morphological result of it. In the embryological phenomenoncalled condensation, the inheritance of embryology from an ancestor can include the loss of an early stage. The morphogenetic field has the property of trans-generational, morphological projection.  

The embryo of the insect develops from a flat band on the ventral side. Cells from other places arrive to form a tube from the band, which will be the gut. There is no discernible guiding force that may be perceived in these seemingly random movements.  

The frequently cited model of condensation is the evolutionary predecessor of the modern winged insects, the wingless apterygotes that persist in silverfish species. Their embryos display clearly that a tube is formed by the axial infolding of the band, seemingly caused by a compressive force. This tube then disintegrates, the cells dispersing to other locations. Subsequently, these cells reorganize as the gut tube. In their descendants, the pterygote insects, the first step seems to be eliminated, leaving cells with an ancestral memory of their place in a tube.  

The ability of cells to reassemble after dispersal is a well-known principle of cell behavior. This phenomenon can account for the ease with which cells seem to “know” their place in early embryonic development, a most baffling experience to behold. The cells are doing something they learned eons ago from ancestor species, inherited as a species-specific characteristic curvature of the membrane.  

Observed Embryology vs. the Lost First Act of Creation 

The drawings presented here are by no means part of observed embryology. They are reconstructions of the missing initial stages of embryogenesis. Yet the premise of their existence produces a fail-proof hypothetical, undeniably accurate, predictive model of the forms of plant and animal life, well beyond coincidence.  

The disappearance of these simple topological deformations from observed embryology may be accounted for by two phenomena, well known in evolutionary developmental biology. In the phenomenon called Condensation, initial embryological stages vanish as terminal additions are made over eons. The preservation of their influence, despite their apparent disappearance, is attributed to the phenomenon called Morphogenetic Fields. In observed early embryology, cells appear to self- organize with no discernible directive motivation, to the confusion of embryologists, just as the milkman’s horse over time comes to know all of his stops. This has been called the Milkman’s Horse Metaphor, where original, repeated directed actions are lost over time. 

Embryology vs. Genetics 

The 20th century was the century of genetics, culminating in the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000. As the full sequence was unveiled, geneticist Walter Gilbert brashly asserted that scientists would now have access to “total knowledge of the human organism.” The 20th century passed as researchers failed to demonstrate that the genome contains a blueprint for body form. 

The idea of the genetic origin of form is based on the discovery in the 1950’s that the artificial removal of certain genes from the genome results in the failure of the embryo to produce a certain organ. The gene often take its name from the anomaly it is claimed to produce, for example, the eyeless gene. It soon became clear that genes do not form organs, but instead trigger unknown mechanisms by which they are then formed. There is no nose gene. There is no map or blueprint in the genes. The genetic theory of the inheritance of form is a negative, or default theory, reminiscent of the famous joke: 

“How do you make a statue of an elephant? 

Answer: You take a large block of marble and chop away any part that doesn’t look like an elephant.” There is a profound philosophical and psychological difference between the idea that the form of our body is the result of random occurrences in the environment versus the idea that it is the result of the rational laws of physics, as in the formation of crystals and the rest of the physical universe.  

The Irrelevance of the Cell 

The coherent train of mechanical events comprising the embryological sequence is interrupted by the intrusion of cleavage—the sudden subdivision of the egg into hundreds of cells. The theory that cellular subdivision is irrelevant to morphology clarifies the topological sequence that shapes the embryo. Cellular irrelevance is the basis of the once-prevalent organismal theory of development, which dismisses the role of the individual cells as mere bricks. The organismal theory holds that origin of complex multicellular life is in the subdivision into cells of large, complex single cell organisms, examples of which still exist as in the protozoans. This was replaced in the 1930’s by the current developmental cell theory, which attributes the origin of metazoan life to the colonial animals such as sponges and corals. But there are no known intermediate forms between the colonial animals and their successors, or other evidence to support this conjecture.  

Nature’s Enlarging Machines  

The discovery of the geometric origin of form exposes nature’s secret process: The body is an enlargement of its own egg. 

Cells subdivide in two systems. Most phyla produce an egg that subdivides sequentially into a thousand separate cells forming the embryo and then proliferate separately, causing enlargement with deformations of the original image.  

Insects use a different system called the “syncytium.” The insect egg is a self-organized, elongated, segmented membrane enclosing cytoplasm that contains some hundred genetic nuclei. These nuclei migrate to the surface as the egg grows and develops. Then each nucleus encloses itself within a membrane, finally converting the original membrane into a tissue of separate cells, by which time the egg has begun to form the embryo on its own. Each cell will proliferate, resulting in the enlargement of the embryonic structure, often accompanied by substantial and extreme deformations.  

Except in simple animals, proportional variations and deformations in the adult form disguise its simple geometric origin—that of a segmented elongated toroidal surface, the form of the primordial germ plasm—and also the presumed form of the primordial ancestors of complex life. Biodiversity comprises variations so vast and extreme that they succeed in overwhelming and obscuring the theme itself.  

From insect embryogenesis it is clear that the process of cellular subdivision is separate from the morphologically formative forces that actually shape the embryo and serves to obscure the workings of the latter. 

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny 

This challenging epigraphic sentence coined by Ernst Haeckel as the “biogenetic law” was once prominent in biology texts as a famous description of how biology works, implying that the formation of each individual body occurs by the repetition of its own evolution beginning with the first cell. The idea falls in and out of favor periodically. While the steps of embryology of every biological group has been described in detail in the nineteenth century by Haeckel himself and others, one can only hazard educated guesses at how life began historically, presumably with one cell. Oparin described how lipid molecules that constitute the membrane of all cells automatically form microscopic spherical vesicles that enlarge and split in two. Comparably, life begins with the egg, which proceeds to subdivide endlessly, forming structures that bear only remote resemblance to the stages known to comprise the evolution of the complex phyla. The human embryo includes stages featuring gills, a tail and other forms reminiscent of the presumed evolutionary predecessors. While Haeckel considered the stages of embryology to be the repetition of past adult stages, his predecessor von Baer considered embryology the succession of previous embryological stages.

Does Ontogeny Really Recapitulate Phylogeny? 

In the opening page of Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Gould, 1977), Stephen Jay Gould recounts having to look over his shoulder to secretly admit to an astonished colleague that he was writing a book about the verboten phenomenon. The evidence pro “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is considerable, consisting of the many instances in embryology where the embryo seems to undergo transient stages that resemble those of its evolutionary predecessors, for example, in humans, the embryonic presence of gill slits, a tail, fur, a two-chambered heart and paddle-like limbs. Infants set out as quadruped crawlers. Beginning with a single cell, original life forms may well have progressed by adding cell divisions to the developmental process, going a step further in each generation, and eventually losing the initial steps. 

The Poorly Designed Human Body 

The evolution from ape-like hominid to Homo sapiens is an example of design gone wrong. In the process we have lost many characteristics valuable to the survival in the environment.  

Our upright bipedal posture, useful for looking around without bothering to stand up, as do some quadrupeds, has cost us the ability to run fast. Humans can be overtaken by any four-legged creature a fraction of our size. Two-legged running is less efficient than four-legged running, where the energy expended in the contraction of the muscles is saved like a compressed spring as it passes from fore to hind limbs. We cannot keep up in a long trek with our domestic animals. Moreover, our bare feet are painfully sensitive to the terrain. Our toes and toenails are useless. We have lost most of the tree-climbing prowess of the other primates. 

• Humans are nearly the only hairless mammals. The vestiges of the fur coats that we retain are useless. In fact, matted head hair and beards are a disadvantageous, unsanitary mess. We freeze in cold weather unlike our pets. 

• Our teeth have lost much of their bite value in combat. To add insult to injury, they rot. 

• In our limited diet, we have to cook our meat and cannot digest cellulose. We give birth generally to only one baby at a time.  

• We see and hear fairly well but our sense of smell is weakened to the point of uselessness.  

• Childbirth has become painful for no good reason.  

• We have an instinctive sense of shame and embarrassment that does not encumber other animals. 

• We are subject to more disease than other animals. We get depressed. 

• We needed to invent clothes to gain comfort in inclement weather. We needed to invent shoes to protect our sensitive, underdeveloped feet. We needed to invent chairs, tables and beds because we are uncomfortable when we are not standing. 

Were it not for our big brains, we would have become extinct 50,000 years ago. 

All these characteristics can be attributed to a single cause: The retardation of embryological development, a result called “neoteny,” caused by a process called paedomorphosis or fetalization. Stephen Jay Gould called neoteny the most important effect on human evolution (Gould, 1977; Ashley Montague, 1988). It is scandalous that anthropologists regularly ignore neoteny, ascribing all human traits to genetic effects.  

A Theory for Astrobiology 

Astrobiology is the scientific discipline that examines the possibility of life elsewhere than on earth. 

It is defined as the study of the origin and evolution of life in the universe. As yet no evidence of extraterrestrial life, or exobiology has been found in spite of efforts by thousands of scientists in dozens of institutions worldwide. The likelihood of astrobiological life is supported by the astronomical number of heavenly bodies available to support it, and described by the famous Drake Equation that takes into account the many factors that are deemed necessary to support life.  

A secondary question posed is whether extraterrestrial life will resemble the terrestrial model. It has been established that the material content of other planets follows the earth model. The chemical elements are the same universe-wide and combine to form minerals according to the laws of chemistry, and conglomerate according to the laws of physics. But the laws that form the biological body are still unclear.  

Two theories prevail to account for the advent of complex living form. They are the theory of natural selection, and self-organization. According to natural selection, complex life evolved by the selection for survival in nature among randomly generated mutations. Self-organization is the idea that life originated and evolved by the action of chemical and physical principles, much as those that guide the formation of crystals and geological structures.   

In order for life somewhere in outer space to resemble earth-life via natural selection, the entire sequence of environmental changes experienced during the billions of years of earth history would have to be repeated intact. This would introduce a factor in the Drake equation that would strongly argue against the possibility of earth-like life.   

If life evolves by physical laws of self-organization, then we may indeed meet an anthropomorphic ET. 

Paleontology 

The impetus for a new interpretation of the morphogenesis of body form is the scientific impasse over proper interpretation of the Cambrian Explosion. Briefly stated, the profound morphological changes seen in the Early Cambrian occur in too short an interval of time to be easily explained (or explained at all) by the neo-Darwinian process. The search is on for other, more plausible, mechanisms that move us beyond a fallacious reliance on extrapolation of microevolutionary change to the macroevolutionary level. Unfortunately, many established paleontologists have difficulty coming to grips with the magnitude of the problem, and tend to slip back to microevolutionary explanations that at least have the benefit of being politically expedient so long as Neo-Darwinism is seen as the reigning paradigm. Paleontologists have been led astray by a misguided desire for recognition from their evolutionary biology colleagues. The attempt of some paleontologists, it has been said, to return paleontology to the “high table” of Modern Synthesis Biology in evolutionary discourse, is of course no solution. Paleontology has abundant data staring it in the face that directly contradicts the main tenets of the synthetic view. The research presented here is one of several new approaches that emphasize this impasse. Strictly in terms of scientific merit, there is great irony in the fact that the “high table” is now occupied by paleontologists (who respect their own data), symbiogeneticists, and morphologists, who are establishing new models for rapid morphological change.

Gastrulation and Peristalsis 

The universal embryological phenomenon of gastrulation, the entry of the outer layer into its own interior, is experienced in the embryology of virtually all complex animals. A segmented, elongated, streaming torus subject to coordinated constrictions of the segments will produce concurrent peristalsis in the inner and  outer tubes, accounting for anterior-posterior alimentation, the anterior–posterior movement of ingested food, and anterior directed movement of the body by the limbs. As a demonstration of this relationship, consider the dramatic reversal of alimentary polarity in the evolutionary derivation of the deuterostomes from the protostomes.  

The Natural Grid Pattern 

A near universal feature of the patterning of the plant and animal kingdoms is that of an underlying orthogonal grid, observable in the geometrical configurations of plant branch, leaf and flower patterns, animals skin patterns, the segmented patterning in the vertebrate skeleton, and, indeed, the brain.  

This grid pattern, the morphogenetic field of whole-organism biology, has a molecular basis. It is known that the lipid molecules that constitute the fabric of all cell membranes naturally self-organize in rows and columns. It is therefore plausible that the streaming of the lipid membrane of the ancestral immortal germ plasm over millions of years will impart an engrained pattern in the form of an orthogonal grid. The nerve system dwells in the interstices of this grid of cells. This grid expresses itself in the organismal scale by mosaic enlargement consequent to cellular subdivision. The universal feature of segmentation may be accounted for by the same causes. 

The brain is a tube of cells organized in an orthogonal grid as an extension of the nerve tube of the spine. The retinal grid of the eyes is a direct extension of this grid. The cells of the brain are in a normal state of stasis, subject to excitement by an irregular image received by the eye.  Behavior consists of the continual effort of the brain to remain in a state of stasis by avoiding any input that is not concordant with the grid pattern of the brain. A discomforting image can agitate the connections with the limbs resulting in flight.   Similarly the ears can provide sounds that are concordant with the brain grid as exemplified by music.   

The general architecture and superficial patterning in radial and bilateral animals is on the plane of a rectilinear grid that can be accounted for in the organization of the cell membrane in rows and columns of lipid molecules, and the tendency of cells to form tissue comprised of a grid of cells. Although the fact that the brain is in the form of a grid has been known for a century, modern techniques including magnetic imaging have provided clear images, reported in Science (Wedeen, 2012). 

The Non-Teleological Origin of Animal Locomotive Behavior Patterns

D’Arcy Thompson concludes his legendary tome, On Growth and Form, with the understanding of the living system of the body as a system of electrically connected cells. The following pursues this conjecture:  

The model of the bilateral animal as a gridded tube of cells electrically interconnected by the nervous system is the basis for a theory of the origin of animal motion. This model presumes that the tube is composed of electrically connected annular rings of cells. Uniform electrical potential in the entire structure will sustain dynamic stasis. Any electrical discontinuity will result in the deformation of the structure. 

A change is the electrical potential of a ring of cells will cause the component cells to contract and the ring to contract, or shrink. The passage of an electrical signal from one end to the other will cause a sequential shrinkage in the segmental rings. A differential in potential on one side will cause one side to contract resulting in the predicable deformation of the ring.  A lateral differential will cause the axis of the structure to deform laterally. The coordinated combination of both types of discontinuity will predictably result in the lateral squirming motion typical of bilateral animals causing axial locomotion. Those that have pairs of limbs attached ventrally to each segment will be subject to the efficient anteriorly directed locomotion universal in bilateral animals. Visual or other types of stimulus imposed on the grid from one side will cause the structure to warp axially and thus change the locomotive trajectory laterally toward or away from the origin of the stimulus. A resulting equilibrium will result in the placement of the stimulus on the centerline of symmetry. This effect can cause two animals to encounter each other head on, or else to flee, accounting for head-butting aggression and food and twig gathering. This model is proposed as a non-teleological basis of instinctive hunter-gatherer behavior. 

The Origin of the Heartbeat 

The protein molecules in the protoplasm upon slight environmental influence fold into reduced volumes. Thus protoplasm has the property of shrinking in volume. The periodic shrinking and swelling of the protoplasm volume during streaming generates waves. Since newly subdivided cells remain connected by thin tubules, wave pulsation may link all cells in a tissue, in the origination of coordinated movement, heartbeat, and vascular flow. In later, more developed structures, cells are interconnected by nerve cells, where wave impulses are translated into electrical potentials. 

The Advent of Death 

Mortality began historically with the chance unequal subdivision of the primordial cell, one twin maintaining its small single-cell amoeboid size and form, while the other continued to subdivide, creating a large, unstable, multi-celled structure, the mortal somatic body, ours, for example. This body temporarily houses its smaller twin, the immortal germ plasm, which traverses the body, growing rotund, turning into the egg, by the inclusion of a huge spherical gene-bearing nucleus, ending up in the ovaries, and is born from the body of its mortal twin before the latter dies and disintegrates, the egg thence to go forth and repeat the cycle (August Weismann).    

Membrane and  Tissue 

The lipid membrane expands by incalation, the introduction of new molecules directly into the membrane wall. By this means a limited degree of topological complexity can be reached, as seen in the single-cell animals. Multicellularity begins when the membrane is replaced by a tissue of cells. This process is exemplified in the embryology of insects called the syncytium, or plasmodium.  In all insects the egg is large, elongated, the membrane axially segmented. The single small nucleus subdivides until there are hundreds, which all at once migrate to the surface and fuse with the membrane turning it into a tissue of cells. Now the process of further expansion provides the option of varying rates of expansion resulting in organs, and of cellular differentiation to provide for specialized   function. The syncytium is the common form in lower taxa, including  fungi and slime molds.   

The Geometry of Palingenesis, The Subdivision of Spheres 

The subdivision of a sphere by sequential cleavages is described in the strange geometry called palintomy. Upon fertilization the hugely oversized egg cell is reduced to a same-size ball of hundreds of normal-size cells by 10 or 12 rounds of binary fission. From the complex configurations resulting from the stacking of the subdividing cells, symmetrical patterns emerge, beginning with the first three subdivisions of the spherical egg, which produces eight hydro-dynamically, interconnected cells. Geometry and fluid dynamics can predict the configurations these eight cells will assume, based on simple parametric variables. These hypothetical constructions predict the forms assumed by plants and animals.  

The idealized, hypothetical model of the last universal common ancestor is of eight cells arranged as the corners of a cube, each connected by a tube of membrane to the adjacent cells, and to a spherical plenum in the center of the configuration. These hypothetical constructions predict the forms assumed by plant and animal life. Radial body forms result in cases where the central plenum persists in development. When the central plenum does not develop, the four left and right pairs of connected adjacent cells produce the bilateral body form. 

Besides providing the emergent patterns of life, palintomy confers a remarkable topological property on the mass of cells produced by this interesting process—that of self-recording history—likened to the annual rings in trees. Sequential binary fission creates a generationally subdivided map recapitulating the steps of its creation, much as a map of a city shows the original historical subdivisions superimposed on the later subdivisions. Cells know their address and zip code. The dividing cells maintain their lineage spatially in the dividing cell mass. By the phenomenon of induction any past stage may be recalled. Stages may be skipped in embryogenesis as cells take shortcuts. These strange properties can account for two important otherwise unexplained phenomena: the inheritance of form and regeneration. The general architecture of complex plant and animal bodies can be deduced from the eight-cell figure, accounting for a wide variety of otherwise imponderable proclivities of nature for certain forms.  

This fundamental geometry of cell division can explain the universal architectural styles and features of the animal body plan including: the acutely pointed insect mouth and abdomen, the vertebrate snout and drawn-out tail, the human fetal position, and why the trilobites and crustaceans can roll up, as do the larvae and juveniles of insects. The vertebrate embryo is an unfurling spiral coil with the ear as the central axis, which easily rationalizes its complex spiral morphology. 

Teratology 

Teratology is the study of abnormalities of body form. Since such anomalies are common in humans and other vertebrates there is much for the teratologist to study. An important goal is the medical study of human birth defects. Human conjoined twins live to adulthood with skeletons, muscle and nerve systems that are different from those of any other individual, and different from each other, and possibly unique in the entire history of the race. The specially shaped bones that divide the bodies are as effective, or well designed, for the purpose as any other part of the body. If all humans were conjoined twins then one may say that the Y-shaped vertebrae that separate them resulted from evolution over eons, and are produced by certain genes. But again, no two conjoined twin are alike.  

If the body is shaped by evolution and generated each time by the genes, there is no way to account for abnormalities of any kind. Do we carry an unused genetic blueprint for every abnormality that can possibly happen? Some conjoined twins have bodies that are as much a marvel of design as the normal body. Where then is natural selection? To what environment did they adapt? The theory that the embryo is made by genes that evolved by the natural selection of mutations resulting from genetic errors cannot explain the common phenomenon of abnormalities.  

A plausible explanation is that abnormalities can occur only with normal bodies that have resulted from eons of evolution. The abnormal members are always versions of organs that exist in the normal individual. Experimental embryology recognizes that deformations of all kinds can be induced mechanically in the early stages of embryogenesis. Early embryological mechanical error can account for teratology. Teratology confirms the idea that body form is encoded in the genes remains untenable. The normal body, therefore, like the abnormal body, results from self-organization of parts generated during embryogenesis from raw materials produced by the genes at precisely timed intervals. 

The Inside-Out Direction of Growth 

The general scheme of growth of the multicellular organism is the formation of new membrane on the inside surface of the existing membrane which encloses the body. The cytoplasm of the cell is continuously producing cell-forming molecules that migrate to the inside surface of the enclosing membrane. The inner membrane of the bilayer expands faster than the outer, causing the outer to crack, burst or disintegrate. This internally originating growth scheme is evident in the growth process of virtually all plant and animal life. Tree trunks grow as the cylindrical cambium layer expands within a fixed cylindrical cortex that cracks axially, hence the texture of tree bark. The entire plant comes under pressure, which is released in buds consisting of layers of embryonic leaf and flower surfaces that tear along patterned lines of tension.  

Many insect and reptile orders grow by the formation of a perfect replica of the body forming inside the outer skin, which cracks dorsally, allowing the newly molded body shape to crawl out of the fissure, leaving a shell of the old body behind, clinging to a twig.  

The embryo develops and grows concurrently. Vertebrate evolution is directed by neoteny, or fetalization, the gradual embryological retardation of development, with respect to growth. Humans are fetal chimps. The larval forms of animals generally are unrelated to the adult form. This is clear in caterpillars and butterflies, tadpoles and frogs, as well as the many strange shapes of the larvae of the marine animals. In these cases it is a plausible conjecture that the larva results from the outer membrane of the egg, within which dwells the result of the inner membrane. This may begin to develop at a later time, casting off, or absorbing, the larval outer body. In vertebrates the outer skin disintegrates. We wash ours away in the shower. 

Larvology 

The path from egg to adult is rarely direct. Embryologists recognize as a rule that most species start out by generating a form which has little or no relation whatever to the adult goal. Extreme cases are the caterpillar/butterfly, tadpole/frog examples. Almost all marine animals start life as a swimming larva shaped like a blob with one or two rows of cilia and extended fingers pointed outward with no apparent use, bearing names like nauplius, trochophore, planula, pilidium, cyphonaut, tornaris, pericalymma, auricularia, pluteus, ephyra, bipinnaris, to name a few. These suddenly turn into sea cucumbers, starfish, sea urchins, oysters, clams, sea lilies, acorn worms and jellyfish, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Species as unrelated in the adult form as worms and mollusks sometimes share identical larvae. Some closely related species have vastly different larvae. Some species have a choice of two different larvae. Biology is at a loss to account for this morphological chaos. Geneticists write it off saying that different species must have independently evolved the same larva by natural selection, with no further explanation. What could nature be thinking?  

Donald I. Williamson and Lynn Margulis have presented the thesis that the larval form is the result of symbiosis, the union by hybridization of unrelated species. This plausible premise was greeted with ridicule by geneticists realizing that, if true, their entire belief system, careers and funding sources are done for. Margulis is celebrated for her now widely- accepted account of the origin of nucleated protozoan’s by symbiosis. But the theory that the colorful onycophoran velvet worms hybridized with butterflies contradicts the belief system of too many entomologists. 

Similarly, the path from egg to human adult is not direct. The early stages of human embryology consist of a bent tube, the face open in front, lined with grotesque bulges. These suddenly give way to the later stages of the form of an adorable fetus. The initial forms occur with no visible precedents. It is reasonable to presume that historical precedents once existed and have now disappeared. The exercise of reconstructing these lost forms is the crux of this essay. As a metaphor, the passage from New York to Los Angeles, now the direct, great circle route, began historically with a trip around South America.

Ingestion and Locomotion by Peristalsis 

The chemical property of protoplasm to form a bilayer membrane leads to the formation of the streaming toroidal membrane configuration, which is the progenitor of the basic biotic form of the segmented toroidal tube with paired appendages, as well as the physiological processes of axial locomotion by the coordinated movement of paired appendages and alimentation by the peristalsis of the internal gut tube. Peristalsis is the periodic wave contraction of the muscles that comprises the tube of the gut, causing the movement of the contents of the gut from anterior to posterior. The membrane is composed of rows and columns of lipid molecules that organize themselves in segments in the shape of rings, from the front to the rear of the tubular animal body, exemplified in worms. The periodic waves of contraction of these rings cause peristalsis in the interior canal, and at the same time cause waves of successive deployment of the pairs of legs attached underneath the external tube resulting in locomotion.  

Growth vs. Development and Neoteny 

The self-same replication of cells results in growth—the self-same enlargement of the configuration they form. Cell differentiation causes development—the change in the configuration of the cells. The generation of the embryo consists of concurrent growth and development. Over evolutionary time the relative rates of these factors may change, resulting in the twin phenomena of acceleration and neoteny. The latter is the retardation of development resulting in the evolution of an adult in the form of the juvenile of the previous state. This process is the main formative cause of the human species (Gould, 1977). It is also the over-all directional factor in the evolution from fish to man. Specialization achieved a maximum in the Cambrian animals. Neoteny was the only possible direction out of this dead end.     

Neoteny and Our Upright Bipedal Gait 

The chief cause of the upright human posture is the effect of neoteny, the retardation of development with respect to growth of the embryo.  The spinal column enters the embryonic skull through a hole called the foramen magnum located at the bottom of the skull. During vertebrate embryology the foramen magnum migrates, or rotates to the back of the skull where it is located in adult tetrapodal animals. This is why dogs look forward. In primates this rotation is retarded. Our foramen magnum remains at the bottom of the skull. As a result we look down when walking on all fours. We must stand upright to look forward. The ability to stand upright may have proved an evolutionary advantage. 

Neoteny and Heterochrony 

“Neoteny has been a (probably the) major determinant of human evolution.” (Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977) 

That one single, simple, phenomenon called neoteny, the retardation of embryological development can be the cause of the entire gamut of characteristics, which set off humans from our ape ancestors, is surely the most compelling effect in human evolution. At once it accounts for our upright posture, large brain, free-thinking curiosity, hairlessness, flat face, flat feet, appositive coital position, and dozens of other uniquely human characters. Almost as amazing is the fact that, although the effect was identified a hundred years ago, and published by the foremost biologists since, most recently by Gould and Montagu, it is ignored by the biological establishment in its summary dismissal of all things inconsistent with the dogma of the Modern Synthesis and remains unfamiliar to most students of anthropology.  

In his landmark work, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), Gould discusses the mechanistic tradition of embryology and evolution, clearly expressing his belief in evolution by endocrinal change in the process called heterochrony. Following is a very brief view of this complex subject. 

Mutations consist of a change in the proportions of the existing, unchanging, generic body form by a change in the rate of growth or development of the parts. The shape of the embryo is the result of a race between growth and development. In ontogeny each part of the organism develops and grows at a rate independent of the rest. The genes maintain constancy. Random errors cause mutants that rarely survive. If development is retarded and growth remains the same then the adult form is juvenilized. This effect is called neoteny or paedomorphosis. Retarded growth and accelerated development produce a more developed adult form.  

The Cambrian phyla were completed 450 million years ago. Subsequent evolution is the result of varying the proportions of the organs by alternating neoteny and acceleration. No novel forms ever appear. Since the generic phyla were fully developed, the evolutionary escape route is in the direction of neoteny, as indicated by the sequence of Picaia, placoderm, fish, amphibian, crocodilian reptile, dinosaur, mammal, primate, hominid, H. sapiens. The ratio of the size of the head to the rest of the body increases in evolution and decreases in development. In evolution the straight spine of the adult becomes curved while in embryology the reverse happens. These phenomena confirm phylogenic neoteny. The robustness of species, resulting from the utter perfection of the reproduction of the parent form, unchanged over millions of years, is the result of the eugenic effect of natural selection. Every organ in the embryology of an individual is subject to the retardation or acceleration of development, producing an oversized, undersized, or absent organ. These are almost always lethal at an early stage.  

In the darkness of the cave, natural selection fails to cull the animal with sightless eyes. The neotenous absence of melanin produces the albino mutation that in darkness does not lead to vulnerability like the peppered moth. Cave animals are usually blind and albino. Bats, as well as being blind, have in many species contorted facial morphology congruent with embryonic stages. Moles have the same facial anomaly. Blind cave fish invariably have presumptive eyes in the form of an early stage of normal development. The skull is distorted as space left vacant is occupied by surrounding tissue, including the olfactory primordia, resulting, by coincidence, in a useful, heightened sense of smell, which will persist, protected against mutant drift by natural selection. Natural selection may maintain, but not originate, form. 

The Direction of Vertebrate Evolution. The Hypothesis that Post-Cambrian Evolution is the Juvenilization of the Ready-made Cambrian Phyla  

It has long been observed that the human is a juvenilized ape, the result of neoteny, the retention of juvenile, or embryonic, features in the adult. Likewise, it may be noted that apes are juvenilized mammals, mammals are juvenilized reptiles, which are juvenilized fish, which are juvenilized, acephalic pre-chordates, dating back to the Cambrian vertebrate ancestor Picaia. 

The history of the vertebrate phylum is one of persistent juvenilization of an initially fully developed adult Cambrian animal. The evidence is in these morphological trends: 

• Over evolutionary time the spine begins straight and becomes arched. A thin elongated body becomes rotund, a small head becomes large, the dorsal face becomes ventral, horizontally disposed limbs rotate to the vertical.

• In development each of these trends are reversed. The embryo starts with a large head and the embryonic curl and ends up with a small head and straight spine, dorsal face (except humans), and vertical legs. Neoteny preserves embryonic features in the adult, which is why these traits are reversed evo and devo, or ontogeny and phylogeny. This trend is seen in insects and crustaceans as well. Compare the primitive apterygotic silverfish with a beetle.

• The persistent, net effect of neoteny accounts for this overarching evolutionary trend. The dinosaurs and birds are a neotenous version of the early crocodilian-type reptiles and amphibians. In birds an oversized yolk presses and flattens the forelimbs dorsally and the hind limbs ventrally. Seals and walruses reverse this trend, where boneless hind limbs are flattened like wings. Amphibian limbs are under-developed fins. 

The following is excerpted from Stephen Jay Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Retardation and Neoteny in Human Evolution (The Belknap Press, 1977 pp. 352 – 358): 

The Seeds of Neotony

With the consummate arrogance that only an American millionaire could display, Jo Stoyte set out to purchase his immortality. Dr. Obispo, his hired scientist, discovered that the fifth earl of Gonister had, by daily ingestion of carp guts, prolonged his life into its third century. Stoyte and Obispo rushed to England, broke into the earl’s quarters and discovered to Stoyte’s horror and Obispo’s profound amusement that man in his allotted three score years and ten is but an axolotl in its pond. We are neotenic apes and the fifth earl had grown up:  

“A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped . . . Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him . . . “What’s happened to them?” “Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily. Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of developmental rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution . . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known. Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor. So wrote Aldous Huxley in his novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan—a few years after his brother Julian’s important work on delayed metamorphosis in amphibians and on the heels of Louis Bolk’s fetalization theory of human origins.  

If a good public press is the sign of a theory’s impact, then the proponents of human neoteny should be satisfied with the suffusion of their theory into popular consciousness—though its influence can only be described as modest relative to that once wielded by the opposing concept of recapitulation (Chapter 5). At least, human neoteny has motivated a long defense of Rudolf Steiner’s mysticism (Poppelbaum, 1960) and played an important role in several treatises in the current fad for “pop ethology” (Jonas and Klein, 1970; Shepard, 1973).  

The notion of human neoteny has its roots in two obvious facts: the striking resemblances between juvenile pongids and adult humans and the obliteration of this similarity during pongid ontogeny by strong negative allometry of the brain and positive allometry of the jaws (Fig. 61). Louis Bolk did not discover these phenomena in his fetalization theory of the 1920s; they had been recognized as soon as juvenile pongids had reached the zoos and museums of Europe. Moreover, the subject was not merely treated as an incidental observation; for Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1836a, 1836b), in describing the form and behavior of a young orang-utan recently brought to Paris, placed his observations firmly in the context of recapitulatory theory.  

Geoffroy began by noting the extent of ontogenetic allometry and retracting his earlier conclusion, based on museum skeletons, that young and old orangs represented two separate genera:  

Could we have dared hope in 1798 that such different crania, one taken from a juvenile, the other from an adult, would reveal the fact of successive development in a single species? For we have a distance greater than that between the genera Canis and Ursus. (1836a, p. 94)

He then attributes these allometries to the early cessation of growth in the orang brain: 

The skull of a young orang strongly resembles that of a human child. The cranial vault, which faithfully represents the form of an organ it protects, could be taken for that of a small human were it not for the more forward position of the maxillaries and the much larger cutting teeth. But it happens, as a result of the progress of age, that the contents practically cease to increase while the container grows strongly and continually. (1836b, pp. 6-7) 

Geoffroy extended his observations to the habits and behavior of his young orang:  

In the head of the young orang, we find the childlike and gracious features of man . . . We find the same correspondence of habits, the same gentleness and sympathetic affection, also some traits of sulkiness and rebellion in response to contradiction . . . on the contrary, if we consider the skull of the adult, we find truly frightening features of a revolting bestiality [formes vraiment effroyable et d’une bestialité révoltante]. (1836a, pp. 94-95) Yet humans display an “inverse system of development” (1836b, p. 7), for our brain does not so quickly cease its growth: both form and behavior remain close to the juvenile state. Could human ontogeny represent an “arrest of development” with respect to the next lower link in the chain of being? Geoffroy preferred to save recapitulation by regarding the adult orang as anomalous—as a form developed “too far” in its own ontogeny and therefore not recapitulated during human development: “This new revelation of such a great departure from the rules [of recapitulation] that we have discovered is a teratological fact of the greatest importance” (1836a, p. 94).  

The resemblance of adult humans to juvenile apes was treated as an anomaly throughout the heyday of recapitulation. But single ugly facts, despite Huxley’s aphorism, do not destroy great theories. Recapitulationists simply followed Haeckel’s strategy in arguing that the anomalies were few, recognizable, and unimportant (Chapter 6). But man posed a special problem: if the most “important” of all species had evolved by retardation, then exceptions to recapitulation could not all be relegated to insignificance. E. D. Cope considered the problem in great detail and admitted that many human features had evolved by retardation. But he quickly added that these retarded features were not involved in our superiority, and that the progressive features of our mental development displayed acceleration and recapitulation:  

I have pointed out that in the structure of his extremities and dentition, he agrees with the type of Mammalia prevalent during the Eocene period. Hence in these respects he resembles the immature stages of those mammals which have undergone special modifications of limbs and extremities . . . I have also shown that in the shape of his head man resembles the embryos of all Vertebrata, in the protuberant forehead, and vertical face and jaws. 

In this part of the structure most Vertebrata have grown further from the embryonic type than has man, so that the human face may be truly said to be the result of retardation. Nevertheless, in the structure of his nervous, circulatory, and for the most part, of his reproductive system, man stands at the summit of the  Vertebrata. It is in those parts of his structure that are necessary to supremacy by force of body only, that man is retarded and embryonic. (1896, pp. 204-205)  

Cope’s defense of the mainstream prevailed, and recapitulatory thinking dominated concepts of human evolution until the collapse of Haeckel’s doctrine itself (Chapter 6). In the best known of more recent usages, Wood Jones sought man’s origin among the tarsioids, arguing that the early ontogenetic fusion of the maxillary-premaxillary suture precluded an origin from monkeys, apes, and even from australopithecines (for these forms retain the suture longer). Writing about the fusion of the two bones, Wood Jones deemed it “probable that its early ontogenetic accomplishment is a guarantee of its early phylogenetic acquirement” (1929, p. 319).  

The Fetalization Theory of Louis Bolk 

The collapse of Haeckel’s biogenetic law and the rise of Garstang’s neoteny virtually guaranteed that a century of observations would be gathered to yield a paedomorphic theory of human origins. J. Kollmann (1905), inventor of the term “neoteny,” paved the way with a curious theory that humans had originated from pygmies who had simply retained their juvenile features during phyletic size increase. The pygmy progenitors, Kollmann added, probably arose from juvenile apes that had lost the ancestral tendency to regress (zurücksinken) during ontogeny to lower levels of cephalization: “The juvenile orang-utan is doubtlessly better qualified for human ancestry than the ape of Trinil” (1905, p. 19).  

Louis Bolk (1866-1930), professor of human anatomy at Amsterdam developed the inevitable idea in a long series of papers (1915, 1923, 1924, 1926a, 1926c, 1929, for example), culminating in his pamphlet of 1926, Das Problem der Menschwerdung. Bolk’s theory of fetalization set the stage for all later discussion. The subsequent debate has been murky and confused because Bolk’s arguments have been presented outside the context of his philosophical positions. His insight has been ridiculed in the light of modern doctrine and dismissed in toto because he linked valid and important data to evolutionary views now rejected. In presenting this detailed exposition of Bolk’s views, I am trying to establish a ground for the acceptance of his basic notion by referring the old observations that lie at its core (and that date at least to Geoffroy) to a philosophical context of current orthodoxy. I shall try to support three statements: (1) It is irrelevant that Bolk’s evolutionary theory seems outdated or even foolish today; his theory was reasonable in his time and he supported it cogently. (2) The data that he presented can survive the collapse of his explanatory structure. (3) We must try to identify the “philosophical baggage” that underlies all theories—both to understand why a man says what he does and to aid in rescue operations when new philosophies require a separation of baby from bath water.  

I want to rescue Bolk’s data—and his basic insight—from the evolutionary theory to which he tied it and from which it has not been adequately extracted.

Bolk’s Data

To support the argument that we evolved by retaining juvenile features of our ancestors, Bolk provided lists of similarities between adult humans and juvenile apes: “Our essential somatic properties, i.e. those which distinguish the human body form from that of the other Primates, have all one feature in common, viz they are fetal conditions that have become permanent. What is a transitional stage in the ontogenesis of other Primates has become a terminal stage in man” (1926a, P. 468). In his most extensive work Bolk (1926c, p. 6) provided an abbreviated list in the following order:  

1. Our “flat faced” orthognathy (a phenomenon of complex cause related both to facial reduction and to the retention of juvenile flexure, reflected, for example, in the failure of the sphenoethmoidal angle to open out during ontogeny). 

2. Reduction or lack of body hair. 

3. Loss of pigmentation in skin, eyes, and hair (Bolk argues that  black peoples are born with relatively light skin, while ancestral primates are as dark at birth as ever). 

4. The form of the external ear.

5. The epicanthic (or Mongolian) eyefold. 

6. The central position of the foramen magnum (it migrates backward during the ontogeny of primates). 

7. High relative brain weight. 

8. Persistence of the cranial sutures to an advanced age. 

9. The labia majora of women. 

10. The structure of the hand and foot.

11. The form of the pelvis.

12. The ventrally directed position of the sexual canal in women. 

13. Certain variations of the tooth row and cranial sutures. To this basic list, Bolk added many additional features; other compendia are presented by Montagu (1962), de Beer (1948, 1958), and Keith (1949). The following items follow Montagu’s order (pp.326-327) with some deletions and additions: 

14. Absence of brow ridges.

15. Absence of cranial crests.

16. Thinness of skull bones.

17. Position of orbits under cranial cavity. 

18. Brachycephaly.

19. Small teeth.

20. Late eruption of teeth.

21. No rotation of the big toe.

22. Prolonged period of infantile dependency.

23. Prolonged period of growth.

24. Long life span.

25. Large body size (related by Bolk, 1926c, p. 39, to retardation of ossification and retention of fetal growth rates).

These lists from Bolk and Montagu display the extreme variation in type and importance of the basic data presented by leading supporters of human neoteny. There are obvious difficulties. The features, for example, are not all independent: the position of the orbits (17) is not unrelated to the expansion of the brain (7); prolonged infantile dependency (22) and prolonged growth (23) are aspects of a more basic retardation in temporal development. Moreover, two very different phenomena are mixed together: the slowing down of developmental rates (8, 20, 22, 23, 24) and the retention of juvenile shapes (all others). I shall explore the general problems of this enumerative approach in the next section.

The Curse of Consciousness, Human Artificial Intelligence and Human Robotics 

Consciousness is the sensing by the organism of its position in space, gravity and light. Spatial orientation is a universal property of animal life appearing fully developed at birth.  Insects, birds and bats need no flight school. 

This universal animal navigational system is controlled by the self-organized embryonic electrical grid that connects all cells. Movement, aka, behavior, acts to restore electrical stasis in response to an asymmetrical stimulus received by surface sensory neurons wired directly to the muscles. Behavior is a self-organized software program to translocate or rotate the organism to an environment more restorative of the electrical equilibrium. The organism is a self-organized robot wired to move where the temperature, pH, light and ambient chemicals induce spatial stasis, or balances. 

Insects, birds and bats are born flying aces. People, wingless, possess the senses for flying.  Any organism that comes to sprout wings will fly by a built-in hard-wired automatic pilot that can be used for walking, swimming and combat. We use ours for fencing, motoring and bicycling and free fall sky surfing.  

Most species are born hardwired to respond to stimuli that have become lost over eons of evolution by the phenomenon called condensation, where new traits are added to the end of embryogenesis and old ones disappear from the beginning. We are left seeing ants and bees doing things for which no coherent account of the origin is apparent, and indeed, none has ever been forthcoming.  

A proverbial 99.9% of animal species pursue a life of 100% inherited, hard-wired, instinctive action patterns.  In primates, birds, and octopus the evolutionary retardation of neuronal development has left inherited fixed action patterns soft-wired. The result is ambiguity in response behavior, left to be decided by the organism itself by the ability to determine the best behavior solution toward the implied goal. This can be seen as intelligence. The electrical system, or brain of the organism finds itself in a perpetual state of dis-equilibrium, the body in a perpetual quest to place itself in an environment more conducive to stasis. Human consciousness is beset with chronic discomfort. This curse of evolution came along with backache and other human-genic products of retarded embryonic development in the primate line, the evolutionary phenomenon called neoteny.  Human behavior is forever directed toward the diversion of thought and relief from a chronically painful conscious state. Life is the quest for equilibrium never achieved naturally, like flying a plane that never lands, eventually crashing due to wear. 

The ancients discovered means of modifying consciousness with chemicals. The practice is questionable if normal human consciousness is seen as an ideal.  But consciousness is also a species-wide annoyance, or affliction—a Gouldian evolutionary “spandrel,” that came along as a useless, inconvenient accompaniment of another trait—here, a by-product of species-wide evolutionary juvenilization by retarded embryonic development. Small price to pay for our big brains, upright posture, a 24/7 reproductive cycle, smooth bodies, long lifespans, and an inquisitive intellect.