Book Description

The papers in this symposium approach biological change from many points of view. These include paleontology, molecular biology, neurophysiology, embryology, psychoacoustics, developmental psychology, biochemistry and experimental surgery to name only a few of the represented intellectual disciplines. This diversity of approaches allows for an abstraction of the general concepts which are implicit in these studies. One of these concepts is that a system may or may not have the ability to repair or regenerate itself, it is well known that many types of receptor cells and neurons of the central nervous system cannot repair or regenerate themselves, this quality is considered as the dogma of the endstate cell.The dogma of the endstate cell is questioned by a number of papers presented at this symposium which study similar cell types in different forms of life. A second concept is that a system's ability to change is dependent upon its state. Some systems are always ready to change whereas others are available for change only when a particular set of conditions are present