The Science of shapes

YOU can help expand it. Guests are encouraged to do so primarily by adding sections, not by editing the existing ones. More ideas, and some possible material are on the related discussion page

In conclusion, chronic restraint stress in adult female rats induces neuroendocrine and oxidative stress, but these effects are counteracted by the shape of the pyramid. This suggests that the shape of the housing has its effects and pyramid shape appears to have beneficial effects in terms of stress management. Thus, sitting inside a pyramid-shaped structure can be used as an effective technique for stress management and for non-invasive treatment of diseases in which the role of free radicals and ROS has been implicated.


Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats M. Surekha Bhat, Guruprasad Rao, K. Dilip Murthy, P. Gopalakrishna Bhat from the Department of Biochemistry, Department of Physiology, Melaka Manipal Medical College and Department of Biochemistry, Kasturba Medical College Manipal 576104, India

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)