The Embryo's Eloquent Form

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The Embryo's Eloquent Form

This essay is part of a work in progress and is subject to continual revision. Date of last revision: May 22, 2008.

Copyright 2008 The Nature Institute. All rights reserved. You may freely redistribute this chapter for noncommercial purposes only.

Given the importance to us of questions about our own origins and destiny, and given all the conflicting views about our place in the cosmos, it's odd how rarely anyone thinks to look at our human origins and try to answer the questions directly. Where do we see the nascent human being coming from and going to? Can we not allow the new arrival to speak for itself?

Giving and Receiving

In the fall of 2007 I sat in a workshop as Jaap van der Wal projected onto a screen a series of images showing how a human embryo grows its arms, starting from the point where each arm appears to be nothing but a primitive precursor of the hand growing directly out of the "shoulder". As the arms grow, the hands reach forward, around, and slightly downward in a grasping gesture rather like an embrace. Having completed this movement, the arms (as they continue to grow) briefly move apart somewhat, with the now much more hand-like hands turning in a palms-up direction, as if giving or receiving something.

Embracing, giving, receiving: it's a fascinating sequence to watch, in some ways no different from the countless human gestures we see every day. But, of course, there is a great difference. The embryo is not using its arms in the way we do; it could hardly use its muscles and joints, given that it is busy growing them. What I was watching was in fact a gesture of growth - a gesture by which the arm and hand were ...

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http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual/embryo.htm