Preformism and Epigenesis: Philosophical Problems of the Ontogenesis

Abstract

The article examines the opposition of two concepts of individual development – epigenesis and preformism – which respond differently to the question of how the “plan of structure” of living organisms is written. Preformists (Leibniz, Swammerdam, Malpigi, etc.) believed that it was laid inside the embryo. Propo­nents of epigenesis believed that the plan of the structure comes from the outside as divine fishing, forming the power of intangible nature or embryonic field (Gurwich). With the development of biology, which is associated not only with the expansion of knowledge about life on earth, but also with the significant complexity of the instrumental base (primarily the achievements of molecular
biology), many problems have been removed, but many have only moved on to a new one, higher level. Today, representatives of this binary opposition are genetics (in the role of new preformism) and epigenetics (in the role of epigene­sis), andthere is a certain continuity with the theories of the past, which allows us to consider the modern situation as a direct development of the problem field of the past, as a manifestation of the deep, philosophical, essentially, foundations of natural-scientific thinking.