Human Development V: Biochemistry Unable to Explain the Emergence of Biological Form (Morphogenesis) and Therefore a New Principle as Source of Biological Information is Needed

• Main Authors: Søren Ventegodt, Tyge Dahl Hermansen, Trine Flensborg-Madsen, Maj Lyck Nielsen, Birgitte Clausen, Joav Merrick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2006-01-01
• Series: The Scientific World Journal
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1100/tsw.2006.234
• ISSN: 1537-744X

Today's biomedicine builds on the conviction that biochemistry can explain the creation of the body, its anatomy and physiology. Unfortunately there are still deep mysteries strangely “fighting back” when we try to define and understand the organism and its creation in the ontogenesis as emerging from biochemistry. In analysing this from a theoretical perspective using a mathematical model focusing on the noise in complex chemical systems we argue that evolving biological structure cannot in principle be a product of chemistry. In this paper we go through the chemical gradient model and argue that this is not able to explain the ontogenesis. We discuss the used gradients as information carriers in chemical self-organizing systems and argue that by use of the “Turing structures” we are only able to modelling the mostly simple biological systems. The bio-chemical model is only able to model simple organization but not to explain the complexity of biological phenomena. We conclude that we seemingly have presented a formal proof (a NO-GO theorem) that the self-organizing chemical systems that are using chemical gradients are not able to explain complex biological matters as the ontogenesis. We need a fundamentally new, information-carrying principle to understand biological information and biological order.