ABSTRACT
Introduction Whether in the living world or in that of artefacts, we are generally very quick to assume that almost any organised entity has predetermined form and structure. We see a building slowly taking shape, and automatically infer some basic plan, an agent who drew it, and the resulting structure as the gradual realisation of that plan. We see a complex blossom unfolding from its bud, or an infant from its embryo, and infer that the form must have been there all along in seed or egg, and its development is an automatic materialisation. In the case of physical structures, this view has been around for a very long time. During the exciting early period of microscope development in the 15th-17th centuries, biologists were quick to “see” all manner of structures in their “preformed” states, and the microscopist Hartsoeker duly provided us with a drawing of a little man-a homunculus-with all its little parts, curled up in the head of a sperm (Fig. 1.1). The added implication, of course, is that such homunculi have somehow been copied and passed through the generations in the sperm since the beginning of time.
