On the Origin of Form: Evolution by Self-Organization

On the Origin of Form presents a new account of evolution and the origin of life based on the premise that the body form of any species is encoded not in the DNA but in the patterned structure of the primordial germ plasm—the universal predecessor of the egg.

Two hundred years after Johann von Goethe’s Faustian quest for the Urform, the archetypal design underlying all living form, comes the recent discovery that organic forms are derived from a unique, self-organized, pr…