The Science of shapes

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No one can derive a machine from the laws of physics and chemistry, a vocabulary from phonetics, a grammar from a vocabulary, a good style from the laws of grammar, or the meaning or content of a composition from stylistic strategies. At each consecutive level there is a state which can be said to be less tangible than the one below it.
The more intangible the matter in the range of these hierarchies, the more meaningful it is. This is my criticism of all redactionist, mechanistic programs founded on the Laplacean ideal which identifies ultimate knowledge with an atomic topography, the lowest level of the universe.
The full import of my criticism of the avowed program of biology can now be seen. The organism has a mechanism, and this mechanism is like a machine. It has operating principles which harness the powers available from the laws of inanimate matter.
An organism is not reducible to these laws, for in fact its morphological principles are extraneous to the operation of these laws, though morphology controls these energies for the functions of the organism.¹

And this where the most heated debate is taking place today. Rupert Sheldrake, a respected biologist, came to the conclusion that the tools he was given were logically incapable of explaining how life develops the way it does: it provided the building material, but not the blueprints. When he published in a book his analyses and hypotheses, the most respected journal, Nature, called his book "a book for burning" through the voice of John Maddox, the editor-in-chief.²

"This infuriating tract... is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years."

On BBC television in 1994,

"Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy."

Rupert Sheldrake had proposed the notion of morphic fields, a notion not unlike Plato's Ideas.

The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields [theorized in developmental biology], and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

—Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past (Chapter 6, page 112)

Constructal Theory Web Portal
In 1996, the constructal law was formulated and proposed to expand thermodynamics in a fundamental way. First was the proposal to recognize that there is a universal phenomenon not covered by the first law and the second law. That phenomenon is the generation of configuration, or the generation of ‘design’ in nature.

All thermodynamic systems in nature are flow systems (i.e. live, non-equilibrium systems), and they all have configuration. If they do not have it, then they acquire
it, in time. The generation of configuration is ubiquitous, like other phenomena covered by other ‘laws’ in physics. Biological systems are configured. Geophysical systems are configured. Engineering and societal systems are configured. The configuration phenomenon unites the animate with the inanimate. All the other phenomena of physics (i.e. of ‘everything’) have this unifying power. Falling rocks, like falling animals, have weight, conserve energy, generate entropy, etc.

Adrian Bejan and Sylvie Lorente


The constructal law of design and evolution in nature


Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2010

Constructal theory is this mental viewing:

(i) The generation of design (configuration, pattern, geometry) in nature is a physics phenomenon that unites all animate and inanimate systems, and

(ii) This phenomenon is covered by the Constructal Law: "For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve such that it provides easier and easier access to its currents." (Bejan, 1996)

The Constructal Law is about the time direction of the "movie" of design generation and evolution. It is not about optimality (min, max), end design, destiny or entropy.


The concept that the Constructal Law defines in Physics is "design" (configuration) as a phenomenon in time.