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The Origin of the Embryo

Posted by , on 2 January 2023

Dear Node Colleagues,

In response to the front page article in The New York Times of 2 January 2023, “When Does Life Begin,” I am posting a model for the formation of the earliest stages of the embryo to shed light on the question.

A more complete treatise and graphic presentation is available on www.embryogeometry.com.

I look forward to relevant comments.

Stuart Pivar
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The heart of biological science is the search for the way the embryo is formed. The rest is known.

This proposed model is an account of embryogenesis, tantamount to the blueprint for the assembly of the embryo.

Included are the phenomena of morphogenesis, organogenesis, segmentation, limb development, and nerve cord development, all the demonstrable consequence of the singular event of gastrulation. The model is illustrated by hundreds of mechanical animation drawings. 

The model describes the instantaneous catastrophic embryological event called gastrulation as the bursting of the first embryonic structure, the blastula, and its elastic recoil as demonstrably the universal origin of animal form. 

The embryo is the deflated form of the tense, balloon-like blastula membrane upon bursting and elastic recoil. 

Organogenesis is the deformation by elastic recoil of the pattern of self-organized circumferential girdles that encompass the blastula from pole to pole.  

The radial, vermiform, and bilateral body forms result, respectively, from a spherical, cylindrical, or ovoidal blastula. Morphogenesis is the anterior-dorsally directed migration upon bursting failure of the separate layers of the membrane bilayer, governed by the mechanical exigencies of surface wrinkling pattens. Embryogenesis is predictable by the mathematics of topological surface wrinkling patterns.

Taxonomic differentiation is the result of mechanical error in the repetition of the universal anterio-dorsal elastic reaction. Evolution occurs when the modification is recorded and expressed in the genes generationally.  

The genes provide proteins in precisely timed doses that maintain and occasionally change the proportions of the otherwise immutable phyletic form (see S.J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 1977).

The Origin of the Blastula:
Incomplete cell division leaves cells connected by a capillary which itself is divided axially in each cell division. At the eight-cell stage the capillaries intersect and fuse centrally to form the blastocoel, a spherical plenum that enlarges–paved with blastocytes, constituting the blastula, and which eventually bursts and recoils as the embryo. 

The Cause of Segmentation:
The blastula as a water-filled balloon subtends standing oscillatory waves of energy that delineate subdivisions by serial harmonic bisections of the axis that condense chemically at wave intersections and nodes. 

Limb Development:
The separation and dorsal recoil of the pectoral and pelvic girdles at the ventral midline forms the limb buds in vertebrates comparable to the imaginal discs in insects. Development is the reversal of the action.

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One thought on “The Origin of the Embryo”

  1. As pharyngula wrote already in 2010:
    “It’s by Stuart Pivar, proponent of imaginary embryology, world’s greatest expert in the development and evolution of balloon animals, author of a failed lawsuit for $15 million against me, and persistent crank. He has managed to get himself published in a peer-reviewed journal.
    But gosh, it’s harmless. It’s just another kook getting published in a science journal. Let’s all wink and look away and pretend it isn’t happening — we wouldn’t want to seem strident, after all. Closing our eyes to it all is the best response to bad science, I understand now.”
    Nothing to add.

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