PREFACE
A set of blueprints for the human body and other complex life is printed here for the benefit of those interested in creating artificial life, and for those merely curious about the natural manufacturing process. This is the summary of the work of the past twenty-five years, initiated by Stephen Jay Gould, with the participation of dozens of scientists and science illustrators.
By blueprints we mean blueprints, that is, a set of mechanical drawings (of the kind that are reproduced for use by the blueprint process), that can depict the mechanical stages that direct the construction of a complex structure from simpler elements. The stages depict the mechanical consequences of the endless serial subdivisions of a membrane-bound sphere of protoplasm.
The single living cell undergoes serial binary fission to make a ball of cells, that upon proliferation produce one of only two possible configurations: the radial and the bilateral; the jellyfish and the fish; the flower and the bee. Biodiversity is the variations that occur in these fixed body plans by the altering of the proportions of the parts by varying the rates of growth.
Geometrical/mechanical/topological laws govern the apparent chaos that results when a cell subdivides sequentially through the three axes of space making a hundred pieces of itself while confined inside a sphere. Embryologists have never been able to make head nor tail of the blastosphere, as it is called, nor how the succeeding embryo takes shape.
We have over the past twenty-five years discovered a mechanically coherent path that can predict the formation of the radial and bilateral body plans. The corroboration of this solution to the problem of morphogenesis lies in its ability to predict each of the observed landmark stages from early embryogenesis to the fetus and adult.
Thus, these blueprints represent a solution to the supreme problem facing biology: How biology and its evolution work.
The grand message is that function follows form. We walk because that is what happens when limbs alternately extend and flex. Birds fly for the same reason. Over billions of years the repetition of the same sequence of cell subdivisions, gradually extended makes, by rote, ever more complex configurations before the individual dies. Meanwhile the parts move according to how they were fabricated, with no regard for use or purpose. New configurations that lead to systemic failure go extinct. This is called natural selection.
It is no coincidence that nature looks organic. This tautology reflects that the organs of plant and animal seem to expand following the outlines of fluid dynamics--- the shaping of river deltas, ship’s wakes, clouds, mushrooms. We demonstrate here that the body form of plant and animal is the result of the fluid dynamic patters that self-organize in the expanding embryonic membrane.
Goethe famously said: “How is it I am able to immediately recognize life against the rocky, inorganic background, were there not an Ur-form”?
The mechano-biological solution to the evolution problem
Since the recent demise of Darwinism, Non-Darwinian or Post-Darwinian biology and embryology has come to be called mechano-biology, or bio-mechanics. Hundreds of organizations bearing these names have popped up like mushrooms in the past two years. This book presents the participants in these organizations with a solution to the problem they are addressing.
The premise is presented as a compilation of papers and commentary accumulated over years. Some have been peer-review published in scientific journals. Some have been recently submitted for publication, for which they may be disqualified because of this prior publication.
Hence, the reader will suffer repetitions that cannot be easily expunged. The astute reader will discover contradictions consisting of alternate explanations for the same phenomenon. These point out the danger of self-delusion that the investigator faces. The hypothetical construction may not be the only one that can predict the observed phenomenon. A solution to an equation may not necessarily be unique. Indeed any numerical solution to an equation is shared by its plus and minus version.
Readers may satisfy themselves as to what constitutes a solution to a problem. The literature of biology though full of suggestions as to what means a solution to the problem may be achieved, no solution per se has hitherto ever been published. The sine qua non for a solution to the problem of morphogenesis is a set of blueprints for the construction of the body. Anything less is just whistling Dixie.
The Geometry of Palingenesis: The Subdivision of Spheres
In modern biology (e.g. Haeckel and Fritz Müller), palingenesis has been used for the exact reproduction of ancestral features by inheritance, as opposed to kenogenesis, in which the inherited characteristics are modified by environment.
It was also applied to the quite different process supposed by Karl Beurlen to be the mechanism for his orthogenetic theory of evolution. [10]
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 ten or twelve 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 hydrodynamically 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 are the progenitors of 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, although 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 initial eight-cell figure, accounting for a wide variety of otherwise imponderable proclivities of nature for certain forms.
The inheritance of the fundamental cubical geometry of the first eight cells can explain the universal architectural styles and features of the animal body plan including Bilateral symmetry Head and body anterior-posterior symmetry, Dorsal–ventral symmetry.
The trilobites and crustaceans can roll up, as do the larvae and juveniles of insects, and vertebrate young. The vertebrate embryo is an unfurling spiral coil with the ear as the central axis, which easily rationalizes its complex spiral morphology.
Palintomy is the reduction of a cell by sequential binary fission alternately through the three axes of space. The first round of three cleavages produces the primordial cube inscribed in a sphere. The subsequent subdivision of each of these generates the bilateral animal body plan, alike for vertebrate, insect, crustacean or arachnid. Biodiversity is the continuation of patterns of expansion of form, predictable by the geometry of palintomy, or embryo geometry.
The configurations predicted by the fourth fifth and sixth cleavage upon the first three, in the absence of any constraint creates a sixty-four-cell figure of a form easy to imagine. But the egg subdivides with a fixed outer spherical shell that is a prime factor in the packing of the spheres that will ensue. The phenomenon of palintomy will endow the cell with the understanding of its ancestry in terms of a theoretical position in a cubical lattice however dislocated from its real place.