geneticist austin l. hughes wrote that the basic idea behind the book "seems to be that there are certain laws of form built into the universe which somehow determine the development of organisms as well as a number of abiotic processes", but the definition of autoevolution was never made clear. he criticized the book noting that "many aspects of biology are discussed in the text, but these discussions are riddled with erroneous and unsupported statements" and concluded that population biology has discredited any theory of orthogenesis.