I am very grateful to Ward Cooper, who brought Barbieri's book to my attention. He knew of my interest, and somewhat of my experience, in the biology of reproduction and development, and particularly that I was searching for new explanations in the complexity sciences for just those coding and complexity-increase problems that Barbieri has illuminated. What came as a complete surprise to all three of us was that my teaching models for embryology, based solidly in experimental and observational (time-lapse filming) studies of embryos, should so precisely fit what Barbieri pleads for: “a third phase of development, and attention will turn again to the experiments”.

He did not know of them because he came into embryology by the route of studying chick embryos for his research on ribosome microcrystals, and textbook models were not in his search path. Because he had come in through ribosomes, the DNA-is-God-and-RNA-is-his-Prophet model of development so ably purveyed by Dawkins – genes are blueprints – was what he saw as biological orthodoxy. He was very critical of this simple-minded model, so apt for prokaryotes but so inadequate for real development where there is genuine increase in complexity. A typical silliness, representative of the DNA-blueprint paradigm, was Williamson's attempt to explain very similar larvae of not-very-closely-related crustacea by supposing that they had “caught” DNA instructions from each other (1992). What Barbieri had missed was the heterodox scholarship, from Conklin at the beginning of the twentieth century through Waddington and Zeeman, Dalcq and (early) Wolpert, with a few others that saw the genes as only part of the picture.