"cinquirer"  wrote in message
>
> I've been wondering if an informational field (some called it morphic
> field) is behind the blueprint of biological growth and repair or if
> purely biochemical mechanism is enough to explain ALL biological
> process.
>
There's no evidence for any non-biochemical mechanisms at cellular level.
Thought is a biological process and since we know very little about thought
we can't absolutely rule out some fundamental physical principle underlying
it that the physicists don't understand yet. However no-one has demonstrated
why this unknown physical principle, if it exists, should be a "morphic
field".
>
[ salamnder limb regeneration ]
> This process, exquisitely beautiful and seemingly simple, is full of
> problems for biology. What organizes the growth? What is the control
> factor?  How does the blastema "know" that it must make a foreleg
> instead of a bind leg? (The salamander never makes a mistake.)
> Answers were sought by transplanting the blastema to other positions
> on the animal. The experiments only made matters worse. ... To make
> matters worse, it was then found that transplantation of a slightly older
> blastema from a foreleg stump to a hind-limb area produced a foreleg.
>
No we don't know exactly how cells communicate with each other to produce a
multi-cellular animal. However the fact that salamander limb buds can be
persuaded to build a foreleg instead of a hind leg if transplanted late
enough indicates that the cell as been "switched" to a foreleg
bud. There is
no reason to suppose this switch is anything other than a chemical signal.
>
> One attempt at an answer was the idea of a morphogenetic field,
> advanced by Paul Weiss in the 1930s and developed by H. V.
> Bronsted in the 1950s. Morphogenesis means "origin of form," and the
> field idea was simply an attempt to get closer to the control factor by
> reformulating the problem."
>
The problem is we don't know what the "morphogenic field" consists of, and
we don't have a class of phenomena that _require_ a morphogenic field, as
opposed to it just being a competing explanation (eg salmander limb buds
might be switched chemically, or morphogenically).

We know that the testis-determining factor, a single gene at the tip of the
Y-chromosome, determines whether the body develops into a male or a female.
We don't know what mechanisms are involved.

Now if this had been discovered in the sixteenth century, I might have
proposed the following argument.

"It is significant that we call it the "Y" chromosome.
"Y" is the English
equivalent of the Herew letter Yodh, which is the first letter of the divine
name, and taken in Kabbalah to represent God. Now Yodh is the smallest
Hebrew letter, just as Y is the smallest of all chromosomes. Now what is God
but the masculine force? He is He who is. Therefore the smallest tip of the
smallest chromosome is a divine factor that makes a human into a man."

Today of course theists and non-theists alike would agree that reality isn't
structured like that. It is the same thing with the morphogenic field. The
gene may bind to DNA, it may cause hormones to be produced, or there may be
some similar function. It won't resonate with the masculine principle of the
morphogenic field.
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