The morphological basis of self-organization. Developmental and evolutionary aspects.

Developmental self-organization is usually considered as a matter of reaction-diffusion systems. These systems, however, require a specification that can arise only from natural selection. Meanwhile, in the evolutionary context, self-organization is equivalent to the origination of evolutionary novelties: this implies that new structural patterns emerge before they acquire a definite biological function, so that selection is of no relevance in this case. It follows that self-organization should be inherent to the macroscopic (morphological) level of the developing system. Our idea is that the morphogenetic process can emerge on the macroscopic scale only provided that the temporal sequence of events is realized as a spatial sequence of morphological states, and vice versa.