Preformationism was a theory of embryological development used in the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth centuries. This theory held that the generation of offspring occurs as a result of an unfolding and growth of preformed parts. There were two competing models of preformationism: the ovism model, in which the location of these preformed parts prior to gestation [6] was the maternal...

Studies in both prion-due diseases in mammals and some non-Mendelian hereditary processes in yeasts have demonstrated that certain proteins are able to transmit structural information and self-replication. This induces the corresponding conformational changes in other proteins with identical or similar sequences. This ability of proteins may have been very useful during prebiotic chemical evolu...

The need for construction kits (Below) Philosophical background: What is science? Beyond Popper and Lakatos Note on "Making Possible": 1 A Brief History of Construction-kits Beyond supervenience to richer forms of support A corollary: a tree/network of evolved construction kits The role(s) of information in life and its evolution 2 Fundamental and Derived Construction Kits (FCK, DCKs) SMBC comi...

If one considers life on Earth since its very beginning, three levels of organization can be distinguished: the phylogenetic level concerns the temporal evolution of the genetic programs within individuals and species, the ontogenetic level concerns the developmental process of a single multicellular organism, and the epigenetic level concerns the learning processes during an individual organis...

Primordial germ cells (PGCs) develop only into sperm and oocytes in vivo. The molecular mechanisms underlying human PGC specification are poorly understood due to inaccessibility of cell materials and lack of in vitro models for tracking the earliest stages of germ cell development. Here, we describe a defined and stepwise differentiation system for inducing pre-migratory PGC-like cells (PGCLCs...

This paper explores and attempts to explain the paradox that Erik Erikson--after Freud, undoubtedly the psychoanalyst best known, most deeply esteemed, and most widely influential in the sociohistorical surround of world culture--has at the same time never been properly integrated into the psychoanalytic mainstream, but has instead been marginalized, consigned to a persisting psychoanalytic lim...

Uninterrupted morphogenesis shows the informational potentials of biological organisms. Experimentally disturbed morphogenesis shows the compensational dynamics of the biological informational system, which is the rich informational redundancy. In this paper, we use these data to describe morphogenesis in terms of the development of supracellular levels of the organism, and we define complex ep...

We have isolated and identified the vasa homologue macvasa, expressed in testes, ovaries, eggs and somatic stem cells of the flatworm Macrostomum lignano. Molecular tools such as in situ hybridization and RNA interference were developed for M. lignano to study gene expression and function. Macvasa expression was followed during postembryonic development, regeneration and in starvation experimen...

The paper presents and defends the mimetic hypothesis concerning the origin of selfconsciousness in three different kinds of development: hominid evolution, the mind of the child, and the epigenesis of mind within an artificial autonomous system, a robot. The proposed crucial factor for the emergence of self-consciousness is the ability to map between one’s own subjective bodyimage and those of...