Discussion: Morphology as the Foundation
摘要
I find it quite impressive that it was Aristotle who observed the beating heart as the “salient point” in a fertilized bird’s egg [1]! This would actually have been a good start for research into embryogenesis, but as we all know, the history of science continued in a rather mystical direction [2]. Apart from the fact that a very mysterious, fatalistic, and religious attitude prevented scientific research in the European Middle Ages [3], evolutionary biology research ultimately remains enigmatic when it comes to understanding why and how the different species have formed. There is certainly a change in organism and in species [4], but embryologists are naturally interested in how it is possible for a small (or even a large) change to arise prenatally in the first place, which can then be subjected to the Struggle for Life. After all, this problem was discussed very thoroughly by Gavin R. de Beer [5]. And we can be glad that the so-called basic biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel (1874) [6] has finally been refuted (Blechschmidt 1976 [7]). It really would have been too fantastic if the history of evolution actually had an influence on the physiological processes during embryogenesis! This is how Ernst Haeckel really imagined it. Not only is it physiologically impossible, as explained by scientific theory [8], but it was also the first known case of comprehensive scientific fraud [9]. Today, the theory of evolution is even described as the fallacy of the century [10] and debunked as a tautology in terms of scientific theory [11]. And another thing: many people believe that “purpose” is the cause or the driving force behind the development of body shape or organs. This view also goes back to Aristotle, quoted at the beginning, and was even attempted to be comprehensively explained by the embryologist Karl Peter [12]. But this view is also easy to refute: “purpose” is an anthropocentric view that engineers must certainly take into account in their designs if their construct is to function, i.e., fulfill its purpose. But physiologically and in terms of scientific theory, the question arises again: How should the later purpose, the later, postnatal functional necessity influence the prenatal processes of morphogenesis? Meyer already explained this impossibility very comprehensibly in 1926. These questions are fundamentally important, but we cannot go into them any further here.