 Lenoir (1982) traces these ideas to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, notably reciprocal determination of parts and the whole organism during the process of development. A more explicit influence was von Bertalanffy’s systems theory of development (1928 [1933, trans. Woodger]; see the entries on  levels of organization in biology and  systems and synthetic biology). Another influence was D’Arcy Thompson’s seminal On Growth and Form (1917; see the entry on  developmental biology).  A key idea was that organismal form emerges from a self-organizing system, not the unfolding of a pre-existing program.