Morphological engineering is an emerging research area in synthetic biology. In 2008 “synthetic morphology” was proposed as a prospective approach to engineering self-constructing anatomies by Jamie A. Davies of the University of Edinburgh. Synthetic morphology can establish a new paradigm, according to Davies, insofar as “cells can be programmed to organize themselves into specific, designed arrangements, structures and tissues.” It is obvious that this new approach will extrapolate morphology into a new realm beyond the traditional logic of morphological research. However, synthetic morphology is a highly idealized vision of morphology which derives its visionary ideas from morphological engineering and mathematical idealizations in order to understand the principles of molecular morphology. Thus, the question is, if this approach will help to understand morphogenesis better or if it will just enable biologists to engineer morphogenesis. The paper investigates the development of synthetic morphology and its relation to synthetic biology as well as its epistemic gains.

中文翻译：

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合成形态学：工程生物形态的愿景

形态学工程是合成生物学的一个新兴研究领域。2008 年，爱丁堡大学的 Jamie A. Davies 提出了“合成形态学”作为工程自构建解剖结构的前瞻性方法。根据戴维斯的说法，合成形态可以建立一个新的范式，因为“细胞可以被编程以将自己组织成特定的、设计的排列、结构和组织。” 很明显，这种新方法将形态学外推到一个超越形态学研究传统逻辑的新领域。然而，合成形态学是一种高度理想化的形态学观点，它从形态学工程和数学理想化中衍生出其远见卓识，以了解分子形态学的原理。因此，问题是，这种方法是否有助于更好地了解形态发生，或者它是否只会使生物学家能够设计形态发生。本文研究了合成形态学的发展及其与合成生物学的关系及其认知收益。