Life Unfolding
How the human body creates itself
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Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die?
Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: how can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg? A convergence of ideas from embryology, genetics, physics, networks, and control theory has begun to provide real answers. Based on the central principle of 'adaptive self-organization', it explains how the interactions of many cells, and of the tiny molecular machines that run them, can organize tissue structures vastly larger than themselves, correcting errors as they go along and creating new layers of complexity where there were none before.
Life Unfolding tells the story of human development from egg to adult, from this perspective, showing how our whole understanding of how we come to be has been transformed in recent years. Highlighting how embryological knowledge is being used to understand why bodies age and fail, Jamie A. Davies explores the profound and fascinating impacts of our newfound knowledge.
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The bodies that house us build themselves very differently from the way we build houses, says Davies, University of Edinburgh developmental biologist and editor of the journal Organogenesis. A main reason is that there is no boss within the body self-organization rules from the "molecules within a single cell to the large-scale construction of complex tissues." There isn't a control center because control can be located everywhere. In addition to all this building activity, the body must also expend resources to stay alive or it will collapse. Davies offers a detailed ride through the mind-boggling number of simultaneous self-organizing activities of growth. Our cells form tissues and organs via a series of mechanical and chemical strategies that include interactions between emitted proteins; proteins and different cell surfaces with different receptors and adhesion properties; and eventually, molecular messages from different areas of the brain, which itself undergoes activity-dependent neuronal wiring and rewiring. Davies says the future lies in studying larger patterns of gene expression and cell connections, networks that may aid researchers in uncovering "universal principles." Students of developmental biology will find the work useful, though it is rather dense for a more general readership.
