This article considers the role played by a core set of "dynamical patterning modules" (DPMs) in the origination, development and evolution of complex organisms. These consist of the products of a subset of the genes of what has come to be known as the "developmental-genetic toolkit" in association with physical processes they mobilize. The physical processes are those characteristic of chemically and mechanically excitable mesoscopic systems like cell aggregates: cohesion, viscoelasticity, diffusion, spatiotemporal heterogeneity based on activator-inhibitor interaction, and multistable and oscillatory dynamics. We focus on the emergence of the Metazoa, and show how toolkit gene products and pathways that pre-existed the metazoans acquired novel morphogenetic functions simply by virtue of the change in scale and context inherent to multicellularity. We propose that DPMs, acting singly and in combination with each other, constitute a "pattern language" capable of generating all metazoan body plans and organ forms. This concept implies that the multicellular organisms of the late Precambrian-early Cambrian were phenotypically plastic, fluently exploring morphospace in a fashion decoupled from both function-based selection and genotypic change. The relatively stable developmental trajectories and morphological phenotypes of modern organisms, then, are considered to be products of stabilizing selection. This perspective solves the apparent "molecular homology-analogy paradox," whereby widely divergent modern animal types utilize the same molecular toolkit during development, but it does so by inverting the neo-Darwinian principle that phenotypic disparity was generated over long periods of time in concert with, and in proportion to genotypic change.

By examining the formative role of physical processes in modern-day developmental systems, we infer that although such determinants are subject to constraints and rarely act in a "pure" fashion, they are identical to processes generic to all viscoelastic, chemically excitable media, non-living as well as living. The processes considered are free diffusion, immiscible liquid behavior, oscillation and multistability of chemical state, reaction-diffusion coupling and mechanochemical responsivity. We suggest that such processes had freer reign at early stages in the history of multicellular life, when less evolution had occurred of genetic mechanisms for stabilization and entrenchment of functionally successful morphologies. From this we devise a hypothetical scenario for pattern formation and morphogenesis in the earliest metazoa. We show that the expected morphologies that would arise during this relatively unconstrained "physical" stage of evolution correspond to the hollow, multilayered and segmented morphotypes seen in the gastrulation stage embryos of modern-day metazoa as well as in Ediacaran fossil deposits of ~600 Ma. We suggest several ways in which organisms that were originally formed by predominantly physical mechanisms could have evolved genetic mechanisms to perpetuate their morphologies.

In this paper we present the foundation of a unified, object-oriented, three-dimensional biomodelling environment, which allows us to integrate multiple submodels at scales from subcellular to those of tissues and organs. Our current implementation combines a modified discrete model from statistical mechanics, the Cellular Potts Model, with a continuum reaction–diffusion model and a state automaton with well-defined conditions for cell differentiation transitions to model genetic regulation. This environment allows us to rapidly and compactly create computational models of a class of complex-developmental phenomena. To illustrate model development, we simulate a simplified version of the formation of the skeletal pattern in a growing embryonic vertebrate limb.