General comparative morphology

The systemic viewpoint I introduced in phyllotaxis drove me to stress the fact of the presence, in other areas of research, of patterns similar to those found in phyllotaxis. Showing parallelism between structures with various substrata is what general comparative morphology is about. It proceeds from a synthetic and homological approach, and it attributes more importance to resemblances than to differences, as is the case in what is known in biomathematics as relational biology.

We have seen in Chapter 10 that the phenomenon of morphogenetical parallelism allows us to extend the method of phyllotaxis to other fields, such as molecular biology, for the study of microorganisms, viruses, and polypeptide chains. On the other hand, the methods used in other fields such as crystallography can be applied to phyllotaxis precisely because of structural parallelism. The principles of physics that pertain to crystallization are the same regardless whether one is dealing with protein molecules in viral capsids, with atoms in a crystal lattice, or with primordia in a phyllotactic pattern. The physical environment must be structurally the same in every case

In physics Maxwell has shown that the action of a magnet on steel and the passage of a light beam through the air, two phenomena that seem to be worlds apart, have in fact a lot in common. Meyen (1973) used the word “nomothetics” to describe this type of research in which one looks for general principles, common structures, and universality among various sets of organisms or objects.