Goes some distance to discuss shape from which inference we see the future

In John Heywood's Dialogue of Proverbs (1546), ‘It will not out of the fleshe, that's bred in the bone’

https://medium.com/the-wisdom-revolution/a-brief-introduction-to-morphic-fields-

Sheldrake suggests that perhaps these laws of nature are simply habits of nature that have developed gradually over long periods of time so as to seem like immutable laws. Perhaps they were not inherent in the cosmic period that preceded the Big Bang but emerged out of that evolutionary process over billions of years. If the universe was born in a primordial explosion fourteen billion years ago, could the “laws of the universe” also have evolved over time? After all, as Sheldrake points out, this idea of natural laws arose from the minds of men obsessed with the laws of man.

https://www.noemamag.com/a-radical-new-proposal-for-how-mind-emerges-from-matter/

When the tree stopped producing olives, the people who owned the land where it lived made brisk plans to demolish it. But in stepped the Eden Project, a nature preserve on the Cornish coast of the United Kingdom, offering the tree a kind of retirement home, as Eden does for many other plants. Here, people like Ryan make sure all its needs are attended to.

Ryan has deep knowledge of the plants in his care and a consequent respect for them. “The timescales of these plants puts any notion of intelligence into some pretty sharp focus,” he said. “Is that olive tree cleverer than us?” Given its lifespan, I was willing to think: Maybe?

Nonhuman intelligence has been the subject of a long-running and contentious war in science whose sides have periodically skirmished over the past 150 years. It was Charles Darwin who first popularized in the West the abilities in plants that in any human we would be comfortable describing as a display of intelligence.

But we don’t. Intelligence is still, for the most part, tightly defined as a human quality. The strict rules have relaxed somewhat in the past few decades, thanks to animal behavior scientists from primatologists to insectologists agitating to admit the objects of their study into the smart club. Crows can use tools, dolphins and bees use language, whales appear to communicate across hundreds of miles, octopuses are extraordinary escape artists — the list is getting longer every year.

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Establishment of shape during embryonic development, and the maintenance of shape against injury or tumorigenesis, requires constant coordination of cell behaviors toward the patterning needs of the host organism. Molecular cell biology and genetics have made great strides in understanding the mechanisms that regulate cell function. However, generalized rational control of shape is still largely beyond our current capabilities. Significant instructive signals function at long range to provide positional information and other cues to regulate organism-wide systems properties like anatomical polarity and size control. Is complex morphogenesis best understood as the emergent property of local cell interactions, or as the outcome of a computational process that is guided by a physically-encoded map or template of the final goal state? Here I review recent data and molecular mechanisms relevant to morphogenetic fields: large-scale systems of physical properties that have been proposed to store patterning information during embryogenesis, regenerative repair, and cancer suppression that ultimately controls anatomy. Placing special emphasis on the role of endogenous bioelectric signals as an important component of the morphogenetic field, I speculate on novel approaches for the computational modeling and control of these fields with applications to synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, and evolutionary developmental biology.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3413735/

Welcome. In 100 years what is the shape of things to come.