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

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".