Star Larvae: Ontogeny

The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Ontogeny

Science rejects programming in nature, with one exception.

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When it comes to the life cycles of organisms, science carves out a conspicuous exception to its otherwise dogmatic insistence on the planlessness of natural processes.

The pre-programmed unfolding of the life cycle of an organism is an obvious, dramatic example of programming in nature—that is, of teleology. Biologists call the programmed unfolding of an individual organisms's life cycle ontogeny. Ontogeny reveals nature’s potential to act planfully, specifically the potential of natural systems to develop with increasing complexity and move progressively away from equilibrium in accordance with a pre-programmed plan.

Each organism begins life as a single cell. Some stay that way. Others grow into multicellular complexity, progressively differentiating in form and function as they develop, each according to the instructions of its unique genetic coding. (Environmental factors exert an influence within the genetic parameters, but a limited one—i.e., you cannot teach, reward, or with a special diet cajole a tadpole into maturing into a rhinoceros. But through diet and other chemical environmental factors, you can nudge it toward one extreme or another of its phenotypic potential. But the range is constrained by the genotype. Whether it exhibits a robust or an atrophied morphology, it remains a frog.)

An acorn develops according to its internal programming into an oak tree; it will not mature into an adult mushroom or squid. It will develop, given a hospitable environment, predictably into an oak tree. But science does not attribute the growing complexity of a maturing oak to a chance process that just happens to deviate from its simple beginnings because it has enough time to and because coincidences work in its favor, as in Gould's metaphor of the drunkard's walk. Even science attributes the progressive development of the oak, and of every other organism, to a directional program, specifically one that is pre-coded into particular arrangements of chromosomal DNA in an organism's cells.

The tadpole does not—cannot—mature into an adult walrus or the adult form of any other creature except that of a frog. The tulip bulb cannot sprout into a Norway pine. The caterpillar cannot metamorphose into a giraffe. Ontogeny is a progressive development operating in nature that is constrained to a predetermined plan.

And the juvenile form of the species might show little resemblance to the adult form, as in the case of the lowly caterpillar that nature transforms into a graceful butterfly. The metamorphosing insects, in particular, demonstrate the potential of an ontogenetic program to encompass highly diverse forms and functions and release them into an organism’s life cycle according to a precoded sequence of stages.

But no matter how baroque a species' genetic plan, science situates that plan and the species in a larger context of planlessness. This planless context is the overarching biological process of evolution, or the descent of species, called phylogeny, a counterpart to ontogeny that explains the particulars of individual species in terms of their evolutionary descent from ancestral species.