Living shapes never arise de novo like snowflakes or tornadoes; they always come into being as the successors of their forebears. Moreover, they do not come into existence as replicas of such predecessors, but are built from germs endowed with information about how to create an individual which belongs to a given lineage. When entering the enormously interesting and extensively-studied field of embryonic development – especially when taking into account its historical dimension (the so called evo-devo problematic) – we are at risk of repeating banal truths available in any textbook, and providing but another dull depiction of what any biology student knows by heart. Or we may feed the reader good-looking, but alas unfounded, speculations. Special caution should be exercised, then, when approaching the topic by way of the central idea of this book – life as being-together.
In short the egg cytoplasm determines the early development and the sperm and egg nuclei control only later differentiations. We are vertebrates because our mothers were vertebrates and produced eggs of the vertebrate pattern; but the color of our skin and hair and eyes, our sex, stature and mental peculiarities were determined by the sperm as well as by the egg from which we came.
E.G. Conklin, 1918
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Notes
- 1.
What will be said further holds more or less for all eukaryotes. To reduce somehow the number of “more-or-lesses”, we ask the reader to keep in mind only sexually reproducing multicellular eukaryotes such as hares, flies, daisies, moulds, and toadstools.
- 2.
The article is about human culture. Whenever there are references to “people”, “we”, etc. in the quotation, we underline it; we invite the reader to replace such words with expressions like “living beings”, etc.; similarly, the word society should be read as “lineage”.
- 3.
Compare with things likes stones or trees which exist “whether or not we invent labels for them”.
- 4.
One of the most fitting descriptions of such behaviour is the analysis of cartoons by Eco (1994).
- 5.
Recall “things thinging” in Heidegger (Chapter 2).
- 6.
In some embryos, the whole process of cleavage and establishment of early embryonic stages goes on even in enucleated zygotes.
- 7.
We use “phylum” in a very loose sense here, to refer to a group of organisms corresponding to some “higher” taxon like phylum, kingdom, class, etc.
- 8.
In fact, the language is not chemical but biochemical, taking into account enzymes which cannot be understood in terms of chemistry alone; but we will not go into the problem here.
- 9.
In the 1940s, C. H. Waddington (1975) introduced the concept of epigenetics to give a name to causal interactions between genes and their products that lead to the accomplishment of the phenotype. Today, epigenetics serves practically as a synonym for ontogeny.
- 10.
Such as, for example, leaving out the larval stages in one of two closely related sea urchin species. Adult stages are very similar and can even interbreed, yet their ontogeny takes different trajectories.
- 11.
If we still maintain that there exists anything like it. If we start from physis instead, the emancipation will not be that apparent!
- 12.
Like Solaris in the famous work of science fiction by S. Lem.
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Markoš, A., Grygar, F., Hajnal, L., Kleisner, K., Kratochvíl, Z., Neubauer, Z. (2009). Creation and Its Vestiges. In: Life as Its Own Designer. Biosemiotics, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9970-0_7
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