Developmental Biology and Physics of Today

Abstract

We start by analyzing two alternative approaches which can be used for explaining natural events: a physicalistic one, directed towards formulation of the overall laws which should be as non-specific as possible, and an “instructivistic” one, which aim is to create a list of as specific as possible “instructions”. We discuss whose one of them is mostly relevant for describing the development of organisms. We point to some deep discrepancies between classical physics (“physics of yesterday”) and the fundamental holistic properties of the developing organisms. It was this controversial situation which inclined researchers to use instructivistic approaches. Meanwhile, the “physics of today” (and, first of all, a theory of a self-organization) is much more adequate for interpreting holistic properties of biological development. We give several examples illustrating how modern physical ideas and approaches may be used for clarifying some fundamental problems of development. We consider, in particular, the field of an “embrymechanics”, which is studying the feedback relations between passive and active mechanical stresses. In the last section we represent briefly some results of a new field of a “developmental biophotonics”.