Concluding Remarks

Abstract

So, we have finished our travel throughout an ‘unknown land’ of organic development. What are our main impressions? The first of them would be, probably, that this land does not look to have been civilized very much: neither straight highways able to bring us within a known time period to a definite place, nor well equipped cross roads with detailed signposts do we see there. Nothing within this land goes on by strict schedule, nothing can be precisely predicted. True, after a close examination, you will notice in almost all the locations refined workshops, preparing precise products; but a subsequent transformation and a final distribution of these products is again a matter of considerable uncertainty. And nevertheless, after probably a brief embarrassment, you will feel an increased confidence and even a feeling of attraction to this strange land. Yes, you will find there neither any rigid instructions nor predetermined passages to this or that mountain top or river valley: but, in return, instead, a wide variety of different ways is opened for you, so that you are always free to select among them that one mostly suitable for you. A freedom, a robustness and a possibility of achieving, sooner or later, the desirable global goals are surprisingly coexistent with each other in this fairy kingdom. And probably it is more than a mere coincidence that the term ‘field’, meaning initially nothing more than a piece of land and only later being endowed with a deep physical interpretation, looks like the most suitable one for characterising the main properties of the ‘morphogenetical land’. Instead of being a set of some rigid, highly specific points which can be enumerated and studied isolatedly from each other, or a network of deterministic connections linking these points in a one-to-one manner, it is a kind of a fluctuating spatio-temporal continuum, with no one of its localities being occupied by a certain indispensable and ‘privileged’ element. The heterogeneities which we see in this continuum comprise what are called singularities,that is some special (but exchangeable) entities, working as the attractors of the developmental trajectories. And in order to complete the picture, recall that this continuum contains several hierarchically coupled levels.