ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the need for organizational principles to complement the study of molecular mechanisms in theoretical biology. It considers a simple model of control of eye movement to suggest somatotopy as an ordering principle for the description of neural architecture. The chapter discusses the problems of theoretical embryology raised by the requisite neural specificity. It presents a class of feedback schemes, each designed to find a transformation which will bring a pattern to standard form, and give as example Pitts and McCulloch’s model of the superior colliculus as a controller of gaze. Pitts and McCulloch noted that excitation at a point of the left colliculus corresponds to excitation from the right half of the visual field, and so should induce movement of the eye to the right. Reciprocal inhibition by axonal collaterals from the nuclei of the antagonist eye muscles, which are excited similarly by the other colliculus, serve to perform subtraction.
