Embryonic Development in Light of Controlled Chaos Dynamics and Quantum Electrodynamics

Biological systems are necessarily dissipative structures in the long run, and dissipative structures are far from equilibrium and homeostasis: order (periodicity) and disorder (non-linear variability) are “coexisting dynamic states”. The common epistemological habit of modern molecular biology is to reduce an observed phenotype or function to a molecular entity, such as a gene, protein or pathway, which have become the embodiment of causation in biology. In the emerging framework of gene network architecture the attractor nature of distinct cell phenotypes, explains a series of cell behaviors that are not easily accounted for by linear molecular pathways. It explains why cell-type specific genome-wide expression profiles, defined by the values of thousands of variables, are so reliably established during differentiation as if orchestrated by an invisible hand: the self-organizing and self-stabilizing property of biologically significant gene expression profiles is a natural feature conferred by attractors. In the human placental mammal, the embryonic cell cycle and intrauterine development process rests on one of the most effective dynamics to regulate the living, sometimes approaching and sometimes diverging chaos, i.e. a controlled chaos dynamics. Biological system’s development, namely each stage of the embryo development, is characterized by the presence of one-to-many attractors, toward which the developmental dynamic variables trajectories are rapidly approaching from all the points of its phase space. Symmetry propagation and symmetry breaking are essential processes in biological morphogenesis, in metazoan evolution and development. Within embryogenesis, the amniotic fluid (AF) should be treated as biological water in a super-coherent state and may act as an inherently dynamical entity endowed by a proper non-linear dynamics, that creates a biochemistry not governed by random collisions between molecules, but by a code of mutual recognition and recall among molecules based on long-distance electromagnetic interaction. For convenience, a GLOSSARY of terms extrapolated from the body of the text can be consulted at the end of the article.