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Piotr LenartowiczCorresponding author

Dominique Lambert, René Resöhazy. Comment les pattes viennent au serpent. Essai sur l'etonnante plasticite du vivant

[Dominique Lambert, René Resöhazy: How the Paws Sprout to a Snake: An Essay on the Amazing Plasticity of Living Creatures]

Article
10 - 2005, pages 278-280
Date of online publication: 03 août 2016
Date of publication: 30 novembre 2005

Abstract

The general ideas of this book are of double origin. One source is akin to the relatively recent current of biological thought named Evo-Devo. Second source belongs to a more ancient French philosophical tradition represented, among others, by Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Few words about the Evo-Devo research program. Its creation was prompted by the analysis of the developmental processes in the embryos of different species. About fifteen years ago some discoveries related to the dynamics of the embryological development demonstrated a striking structural identity/stability of homeoboxes in different living forms. Homeoboxes are just small genes (only
180 base pair long) determining a strictly specific aminoacid sequence of short polypeptides (only about 60 aminoacids long) which „act" like hormones, „regulating" the dynamism of the gradually developing body. The parentheses were used deliberately, to stress the arbitrary character of the „signalling".

Cite this article

Lenartowicz, Piotr. “Dominique Lambert, René Resöhazy. Comment les pattes viennent au serpent. Essai sur l’étonnante plasticité du vivant.” Forum Philosophicum 10 (2005): 278–80. doi:10.35765/forphil.2005.1001.26.