A present-day developmental biology is a fashionable and extensively elaborated field of research mostly directed towards continuous analytical dissociation of a developing organism into ever smaller constituents. By view of a scientific majority (although if not often overtly expressed) the ultimate goal of these investigations would be in representing an entire course of development as a chain of specific events determined in a one-to-one manner by some instructions coming from a definite part of a genome. True, such a straightforward analytical approach really led to an impressive progress in our knowledge: within few recent decades we have learned a lot about fine details of developmental processes, the role of particular genes in development and so on.

On the other hand, a feeling is arisen that by following this only way we miss some other mostly fundamental aspects of development centered around an inescapable question on how just this space-temporal succession of events have been emerged and is maintained throughout each next ontogenetic cycle. Why indeed each one of these events is expressed at this very time moment and at a definite location? And how the chemical factors produced by the genetic activity can be transformed into precisely structured spatial events?

Such are some of the questions discussed in Beloussov's book. The author argues that for coming towards their solution one should follow the way in many respects opposite to that mostly accepted one: one should better regard the developmental structuring (morphogenesis) as a manifestation of some profound and largely universal structure-forming laws common in the last instant both for the organic and inorganic matter and requiring thus a synthetic interdisciplinary approach rather than a chain of unique events each one of them obeying specific "instructions". Certainly, this viewpoint is not completely new. A list of people mentioned by Beloussov as the advocates of this approach includes such classical names as von Baer, Bergson, Driesch, Gurwitsch, Waddington, not to say about our contemporaries. But only now, believes the author, owing to the creation and the immense progress of a self-organization theory, we get a "possibility to transform the old romantic desires (coming back to Goethe and naturphilosophers) into something belonging to a real science" (p. 223).

In order to exploit this possibility in a systematic way (and not only as a tool for making some isolated models) one should reveal in the developmental events a kind of a multilevelled space-time hierarchy. That means, that we have to start from classifying the developmental processes according to their characteristic times (Tch) and the space dimensions of the arising structures (Lch). It should be just a combined Tch-Lch hierarchy which creates what the author denotes as the "dynamic architecture" of a developing system.

The book consists of 3 large chapters. In the first of them Beloussov reviews some fundamental approaches of a self-organization theory, as well as of a symmetry theory, the latter providing a mostly adequate language for describing structures formation. A mathematics involved is minimal and the mode of description is oriented towards the interests and the goals of the developmental biologists. In particular, a dualistic subordination of the self-organized systems to the parametric and the dynamic regulation is discussed taking as an example the genetical regulation of a morphogenesis. This regulation, by the author's view, is strictly parametrical.

In his second Chapter Beloussov addresses to the "dynamic architecture" proper, that is, to the description of the real developmental processes, taken at the moment isolately from each other, in an ascending Tch - Lch succession. After making this job he takes a risky step by hypothesising what may link together most of these events. He points to the interaction between the passive (bringing from outside) and the active (born within the system itself) mechanical stresses in cells and tissues as a possible integrating factor of development and suggests the idea of a stress hyperrestoration as a universal response to any deviation from the mechanical equilibrium. This immediately involves several interconnected notions, Bergsonian "active memory" (i.e., a memory of a system about its preceded activities) among them.

The 3rd chapter entitled "Developmental Successions" is oriented towards some kind of a spacetemporal synthesis of those dynamic blocks which have been treated beforehand separately from each other. This chapter is concluded with the discussion about "genocentric" and "morphocentric" approaches to development. Exploring the ways for the cooperation of these two approaches (looking for many as antagonistic ones) Beloussov emphasizes meanwhile the differences in their epistemological structure "Whereas a morphocentric approach is a derivative of a nomothetic ideology directed towards establishing some invariable embracing laws of a process under study, the genocentric approach can be qualified, may be crudely, as a "button-like" one.

A belief that the identification of all the genes involved into a given developmental process will provide us by its full description or explanation very much resembles the conviction of a person who have learned the function of the buttons on a TV panel (knowing at the same time nothing about electromagnetic fields, etc.) that he or she gets now a real "understanding" on how the device is working out" (pp. 215-216). This is a vulnerable point meanwhile, which may irritate many people. In any case, who we are as related to Nature: philosophers or mere customers? And if we have really succeeded in finding a "magic button" (and this is just what the genetical engineers are liking to achieve) why should we seek, in addition, some abstract "explanation"? Certainly, the author and his advocates will tell us that any "button" which lacks a theoretical explanation may be non-reliable and/or even dangerous. But this also should be proved.

By concluding this review, I would say that the future of this book will depend completely upon how many persons will become interested in utilizing the way suggested by the author as a basis for his/her concrete research program. If this will not happen, this book will only increase the list of what the author himself have qualified as "romantic dreams".