“In this article I explain the origin of man, based on the laws of physics (yes, it may sound crazy, but I have discovered the origin of man). I managed to change physically chicken embryos, to turn them towards more lizard-like or more human-like, and this shows how evolution proceeds. It’s almost all physics.”—Vincent Fleury’s recent email to me about his March 27 Nature scientific reports article: “Electrical stimulation of chicken embryo development supports the Inside story scenario of human development and evolution”
RELATED STORY—ENCORE: Vincent Fleury on Origin of Form
Paleontologist Steve Gould considered the refined facial features of Homo sapiens—less pronounced jaw, receding mouth, etc., a result of neoteny—the retention of juvenile traits in evolution. As Gould saw it, the human adult head resembles that of its simian ancestors in an immature stage of development.
Université de Paris-Cité biophysicist Vincent Fleury thinks his recent experiments—published in Nature scientific reports—in which he electrically stimulated the head of a chicken embryo nudging the organism to more human-like development demonstrate that there does appear to be a “built-in” pattern of formation, which some paleoanthropologists now refer to as the “Inside story.”
Fleury notes in a 2008 paper, “Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicist’s point of view,” that embryos follow the laws of condensed matter physics, saying—“Physics plays a role in development through several aspects: first of all any push, swelling, fold, etc. that may be observed in biology has to comply with Newton’s laws. In a given material, a constitutive equation relates stresses to deformation or deformation rate. . . .”
Fleury says further: “[V]ertebrate development occurs in two steps: first there is a physical cleavage of a round disc (the blastodisc) into sectors and rings, and secondly, the rings and sectors fold and form a hollow tubular animal with brain vesicles and sensory organs. A texture of oriented cell cables or strings is formed along the lines of cleavage, and the embryo folds by buckling along these lines.”
Fleury’s perspective is that physical stresses and orientation texture are key to vertebrate head development. He describes texture in biological tissue: “[T]he orientation order parameter is a quantitative notion. . . related to the orientational order of macromolecules”.
(So why not let Darwinian natural selection R.I.P.?)
In Vincent Fleury’s experiments at his Matière et Systèmes Complexes university lab in Paris—as reflected in his March 27 Nature paper—he increased tension in the chicken embryo head via electrical stimulation, observing (captured also with video microscopy) a rotation and then flexing forward of the embryo head accompanied by brain shrinkage and then a ballooning “hernia-like” deformation of brain vesicles resulting from a constricting belt of cells in the brain, a “rosary.” The brain is a balloon/rod “hybrid physical object,” he says.
The embryo neck elongated, the head tilted downward, the head and brain dilated as the heartbeat increased and facial features (jaw, mouth, etc.) began receding. Fleury says this dynamic proves a link between head dilation and flexure.
In conclusion, Fleury emphasizes that he is not claiming electricity is the cause of human evolution, but that evolution in vertebrates could have occurred via prepatterned contractions and “progressive change in set points.”
OSCILLATIONS 