HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Biology in the 1920s fell into two camps, those who believed that the inheritance of body form lay in the complex structure of the egg cytoplasm, and those who believed it was encoded in the chromosomes. DNA won. In 1953, the discovery of DNA’s vast structure caused everyone to believe that this must indeed be the blueprint of life. But now, fifty-six years later, no code has been found and biology is left theory-less. This book, The Torus Theory, proposes that form is encoded neither in the chromosomes nor in the cytoplasm, but in the membrane that encloses them.
Body form is encoded in a pattern woven into its texture, akin to the names woven into Madame Defarge’s knitting in The Tale of Two Cities. In the late 1870s, sculptor August Bartholdi made a fifteen-foot model of the Statue of Liberty in Paris. The surface was marked off in squares and each square was reproduced in a copper sheet ten times as large, with the statue itself later re-assembled in its entirety in New York Harbor. The egg cell membrane is similarly subdivided into separate cells; the proliferation of each cell creates the adult body.
Thousands of scientists throughout the world are seeking a solution to the problem of the origin of life and its evolution, which implies that they believe that there is one. Prominent figures in science, including a Nobel laureate and leading NASA scientists, have declared the torus theory plausible. The theory is based on a series of well-accepted scientific phenomena never before used in the present combination. These principles are summarized below with the intent of preparing the reader for the central paper, entitled “The Self-Organization of Biological Form.”
The book answers the following fundamental questions:
1. How is the complex body formed in a few hours from a single egg cell?
2. How did the first single-cell animal originate?
3. How did today's complex living forms evolve from single-cell animals half a billion years ago?
THE PREMISE:
All life begins with the egg. The resultant body shape of species is determined by an engrained pattern in the membrane that envelops the egg.
The Life Cycle:
The background scenario of the working hypothesis of this book is based on the classic description of the general plan of life proposed by August Weismann in the 1880s.
Four billion years ago the primordial ooze produced protoplasm, which enveloped itself in a bilayer membrane skin made of even rows and columns of lipid molecules, forming the first cell. An indentation produced a tubular, torus-shaped membrane that streamed perpetually out the front, around the back, and into the rear, causing amoeboidal locomotion. This streaming over time arranged the molecules in an engrained grid pattern.
The amoeboid cell grew and periodically split in two, repairing itself after each division, creating the one-cell animals that exist to this day. They maintain their form by the persistence of the original membrane pattern and by the action of genetic chemicals within an introduced spherical nucleus.
Some of the original cells came to split into two unequal parts. The larger part continued to subdivide, forming the mortal, multi-cellular body called the “somatic body.” The smaller, immortal germ-cell part is trapped within, traversing the mortal somatic body and exiting before the latter dies. It splits again and makes a new body, repeating the cycle eternally. The body evolves over time, assuming an ever larger, more complex form, dictated by the pattern in the immortal, ancient germ-line cell from which it is formed in each generation, and which itself never changes. The body is formed from materials produced by the genes, randomly introduced into the germ cell.
You begin as a germ cell in the embryo of your mother, which gestates within your grandmother’s body. This germ cell grows to form an egg cell, which, after fertilization, subdivides into a thousand cells. These quickly reassemble, constructing your embryo, guided by the species-specific pattern encoded in its membrane eons ago.
Summary of the Life Cycle:
1. The egg cell membrane is derived from its predecessor, the germ plasm.
2. The germ plasm membrane is in the shape of an amoeboid, tubular torus (a sphere with an internal canal connecting opposite poles) that bears an engrained pattern, the result of eons of amoeboid streaming.
3. The egg membrane is a "morphogenetic field" which has the ability to reconstitute its shape after being subdivided into separate cells following fertilization.
4. This re-assembly guides the formation of the embryo.
5. Different species result from the mechanical deformation of an ancestral toroidal shape.
6. The mechanical deformation of laboratory models of the shape can accurately simulate the complex animal and plant forms of nature.
The torus theory is based on a discovery: the shape of the body of insects, crustaceans, vertebrates, and flowers can all be accurately simulated by simple deformations of a torus-shaped surface. This is a geometrically demonstrable fact, which cannot plausibly be ascribed to coincidence.
How then could nature be using this mechanism? It is known that all individuals originate in the primordial germ plasm, a blob of protoplasm enclosed in a torus-shaped membrane, a patterned grid of rows and columns of lipid molecules. The germ plasm is the forerunner of the egg. Following fertilization, the egg cell sub-divides, its membrane distributed among the hundreds of separate cells. These then quickly come together, forming the embryo, invisibly guided by their ability to "recognize" their former neighbors on the egg cell membrane, reassembling the pattern encoded in the immortal, primordial germ plasm membrane, conferring the species form to the body.
This is a causative, mechanically coherent model of the origin of the complex body from a single cell, which should lead to a fruitful program of confirming experimental research.
The algorithm (meaning a mathematical device) is built on the fact that all bilateral animals share a common body form: a segmented tube with paired, jointed appendages — limbs, mouthparts, and wings. The central paper illustrates in nearly twenty plates how the gamut of animal body parts may be simulated by the mechanical compression and bending of a lab model of the membrane. The unerring accuracy of the algorithm strongly implies that nature is making use of the method.
This graphic model of life origin demonstrates that biological form is not random, but instead, like atoms, molecules, crystals, planets, and the universe, is self-organized, guided by simple, fundamental physical laws. The reader may study the model with the aim of gaining understanding of the nature of living form.
One may well ask, why has this theory of the origin of form not been discovered before? There is no real answer to this question. The same query may be put to any discovery. No one has heretofore noticed that a toroidal membrane can be deformed to simulate any and all shapes and surface patterns in nature. Another valid question is, why are there no photographic images of the meridianal pattern of the germ plasm which are hypothesized as its basis? The pattern presumed to exist in the surface of the germ plasm, which can account for the algorithm, is in the alignment of the lipid molecules of its surface. Although it is not inherently impossible to “see” this, it would require sophisticated technology well beyond the scope and resources of this investigation. The algorithm is hypothetical as well, but its unerring predictive accuracy well beyond coincidence demands that a cause in nature be found.
As a by-product of this premise, three modalities of integrative medicine are given scientific corroboration by the torus theory (see Chapter 1 for further investigation):
1. The practice of acupuncture is based on the theory that the skin is empatterned by meridian lines that enter the body, pass through the internal organs, and form a series of circuits that are connected within one continuous flow. The theory that body form is the result of the enlargement of the streaming toroidal surface of the germ plasm, predecessor of the egg cell, provides a model that corroborates the configuration of the body surface upon which the theory of acupuncture depends.
2. The concept called bio-energy fields may have an origin in the morphogenetic fields that encode the body form.
3. The theory that stress on the tissues of organs can result in pathologies is corroborated by the principle of Mechanical Induction (Emmanuel Farge 2003), in which Farge demonstrates in embryonic Drosophilia tissue that mechanical stress the cell is a necessary and sufficient cause of gene expression and cell division (see paper in Appendix).
Stuart Pivar
New York City
2009
Stuart Pivar
New York City
2009
NB: This book includes a collection of essays written at different periods over the past twelve years, covering varying relevant topics. While it hopefully makes the premise clear, the book contains redundancies and a variety of writing and illustration styles, for which the author begs the indulgence of the reader.
