This paper proposes the philosophical principle of manifestation, intended to resolve the long‑standing contradiction between preformism (form is pre‑given) and epigenesis (form arises from formless matter). The author distinguishes two levels: the basic types of material organization (e.g., non‑living physical matter and living matter) and the variations within these types. The former are ontologically pre‑given and do not arise through evolution; they merely “manifest” (become actualized) when the necessary complexity is reached. The latter – the variations – evolve randomly, following Darwinian and post‑Darwinian mechanisms. This distinction allows us to keep the entire body of evolutionary data (convergent evolution, adaptations, speciation) while rejecting the metaphysical claim that evolution can explain the origin of the types themselves (e.g., how life arose from non‑life). The principle of manifestation has concrete implications for various sciences: for physics, it explains the fine‑tuning of fundamental constants; for biology, it explains convergent evolution; for the human and social sciences, it explains the independent emergence of similar social institutions and mathematical structures; for the philosophy of science, it offers a common language for interdisciplinary dialogue and a demarcation criterion. The principle of manifestation is not a “discovery” in the strict sense, but a synthesis and reformulation of long‑standing philosophical intuitions (from Aristotle and Leibniz to Waddington and Ellis) into an operational framework compatible with evolutionary science. It can serve as a bridge between physics, biology, the human sciences, and philosophy, as well as a heuristic tool for further research.
Alexander Yourievitch Kotelnikov (Sun,) studied this question.