Agustin Ostachuk

Mainstream evolutionary biology, despite its successes, fails to answer three fundamental questions: Where does biological form come from? Why does development follow ordered, purposeful trajectories? And what is the place of consciousness in nature? These silences are not accidental. They stem from a materialist and mechanist worldview – of which Darwinism is the most influential expression – that excludes teleology, form, and agency from its explanatory vocabulary, reducing evolution to a blind filter of random variations and consciousness to an epiphenomenon of neural complexity. The Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT) confronts these lacunae head-on. It begins from a single logical principle – the complex cannot be generated from the simpler – and deduces a complete ontology of evolution as the ordered actualization of a virtual matrix of formally structured layers. Within this framework, evolution is not a blind accumulation of random mutations, but a purposive unfolding of pre-existing formal potentials. Teleology is restored as a real formal cause (the final cause is the formal cause). Consciousness is not an emergent property but the intrinsic condition of access to the virtual, ontologically unified with agency. Drawing on historical analysis, ideological critique, empirical evidence from network based studies, and a systematic extraction of necessary consequences, the EUT demonstrates that randomness, branching pathways, and emergence ex nihilo are excluded by the very logic of unfolding. It offers a life-centered science – a necessary correction to a biology that has forgotten its proper subject: life as an agentic and teleological process in a conscious and purposeful cosmos. This volume presents the definitive, canonical formulation of the EUT.

The Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT) was originally formulated in 2020 as a logical-deductive theory of biological evolution. The present work does not extend or revise that formulation. Instead, it operates at a different level: it systematically extracts the constraints, necessities, and exclusions that follow from the theory's established architecture. Starting from a single ontological definition — "unfolding is the ordered actualization of a virtual matrix of formally structured layers" — the analysis proceeds through ten propositional sets, each deriving necessary consequences concerning the virtual matrix, formal layering, sequential actualization, agency, morphogenetic fields, living forms, evolution as multi‑level unfolding, and consciousness as intrinsic access to the virtual. For every proposition, the text specifies what must exist, what cannot exist, and what becomes unavoidable if the definition of unfolding is to hold. The results yield a coherent and demanding ontological picture: the virtual is a positive mode of being; unfolding is linear, irreversible, and exhaustive; agency is immanent and teleological; morphogenetic fields are the ontological embodiment of form; evolution is development across scales; and consciousness is not an emergent property but the intrinsic condition of access to virtual determination. The theory thus receives its systematic stabilization, elevating unfolding from a biological to an ontological condition of intelligibility for any process of evolution and development.

This paper presents a detailed structural and conceptual comparison between the Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), published by Agustín Ostachuk in 2020, and the "Platonic Space" framework, introduced by Michael Levin in a 2025 preprint. While the latter is presented as a novel contribution, this analysis demonstrates a profound and systematic overlap with the core architecture of the former. By examining foundational principles – the ontology of form, the source of biological order, the nature of novelty, the role of teleology, the guidance of development, and the dynamics of evolution – we show that Levin's framework reproduces the explanatory structure of the EUT, with primary changes limited to terminology. The analysis goes beyond the identification of isolated similarities to document the wholesale appropriation of a complete theoretical architecture. A new section on terminological translation reveals how Levin's renaming of key concepts serves as a camouflage strategy. This paper serves as a definitive record of conceptual lineage and priority, arguing that the "Platonic Space" framework is not an independent discovery but a renamed restatement of the Evolutio Unfolding Theory.

In April 2020, I published the Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), a comprehensive framework describing evolution as the sequential unfolding of pre‑existing virtual forms guided by teleological agents within morphogenetic fields. Five years later, a preprint by Michael Levin introduced the "Platonic Space" framework, which reproduced the core explanatory architecture of the EUT using different terminology—without citing my original work. This article presents a forensic reconstruction of the events that preceded and accompanied the appearance of "Platonic Space". It documents, through a detailed chronology supported by verifiable evidence, the full timeline: the publication of the EUT, direct professional contact with Levin in 2021, repeated newsletter deliveries that he opened and clicked, the eventual appearance of his preprint, and the institutional notifications sent to Tufts University, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the OSF preprint server. The analysis reveals a systematic pattern of Strategic Silence, Hidden Consumption, and Epistemic Parasitism—a triad of behaviors that allowed a fully formed theoretical framework to be absorbed, renamed and rebranded without acknowledgment. By placing on record every relevant communication and institutional response, the article demonstrates that the appropriation of the EUT was not a case of "independent discovery" or "conceptual convergence", but a structural phenomenon enabled by asymmetries of power and influence within the global academic system. This work also introduces the "Conceptual Lineage Ethical Observatory", a new methodological initiative for documenting and preserving intellectual lineage against erasure.

This article addresses the problem of conceptual priority and lineage in contemporary theoretical biology through a comparative analysis of two frameworks that propose non-Darwinian accounts of biological form and evolution. It first summarizes the core principles of Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), originally formulated in 2020, which conceives evolution as a process of unfolding of latent formal potentials, guided by formal causes, morphogenetic fields, and teleological–purposeful formal agents. The article then examines a later framework introduced in 2025 under the name “Platonic Space,” which describes biological development and evolution as trajectories within a structured space of possible forms. By systematically comparing their central conceptual functions—ontological status of form, source of biological order, role of teleology, nature of novelty, and evolutionary dynamics—the article demonstrates a strong structural equivalence between the two approaches. Given documented prior awareness of EUT by the later authors, the analysis argues that the issue at stake is not independent convergence but conceptual lineage and attribution. The article concludes that clarifying lineage is an ethical responsibility essential to the integrity, accountability, and historical continuity of scientific thought.

Contemporary science finds itself caught in a profound epistemic contradiction: while presenting itself as the primary engine of knowledge, it increasingly operates within a techno-economic apparatus that reduces inquiry to commodity production, managerial optimization, and competitive games of prestige. This structural entanglement with capitalist rationality produces a mode of knowledge that is self-referential, conservative, and fundamentally extractive—one that filters novelty through bureaucratic metrics, rewards strategic assimilation over conceptual risk, and neutralizes ideas that do not reinforce existing circuits of power. The resulting scientific landscape is not merely limited; it is systematically incapable of generating the transformative frameworks required to address the evolutionary, ecological, and civilizational challenges of our time. This manuscript argues that such limitations are not correctable from within. They arise from the core architecture of the scientific-academic system itself, whose epistemic, institutional, and economic foundations preclude the emergence of genuinely alternative thought. In response, we propose the construction of a new organizational and conceptual ecology for knowledge: EVOLUTIO. Conceived as a life-centered research ecosystem, EVOLUTIO advances an epistemic orientation in which inquiry unfolds as a creative, relational, and ontologically grounded process, rather than as a market-driven production of publishable artifacts. It is organized to protect conceptual originality, to nurture long-form inquiry, and to cultivate a mode of science that is aligned with the generativity of life rather than the logics of capital. By articulating the conditions that impede renewal in the current system and proposing the foundations of a life-centered science, the manuscript outlines a disruptive and necessary reconfiguration of how knowledge can be produced, sustained, and allowed to evolve.

Evolutionary theory has been shaped by multiple paradigms—Darwinism, Lamarckism, Organicism, Emergentism, the Extended Synthesis, and contemporary proposals by Sheldrake, Noble, Kauffman, among others. While each has contributed valuable insights, they remain constrained by contradictions, ideological assumptions, or explanatory gaps. This article revisits the Evolutio Unfolding Theory (EUT), first formulated in 2020, and further developed through empirical evidence published in evolutionary developmental biology. After reviewing the fundamental principles of EUT and the empirical findings that support it, we undertake a systematic comparison with the main historical and contemporary evolutionary paradigms. We show where EUT converges with these traditions, where it diverges, and how it overcomes their unresolved limitations. By conceiving evolution as the purposive unfolding of virtual preformations through teleological formal agents within morphogenetic fields, EUT provides a coherent framework that integrates modularity, hierarchy, self-organization, epigenesis, and other phenomena underexplained by conventional theories. The originality of this work lies not in re-stating the theory or presenting new data, but in demonstrating its explanatory superiority when tested against the spectrum of evolutionary thought. In this way, the article positions EUT as a robust, argued, and verifiable alternative capable of transcending entrenched dichotomies—chance versus necessity, mechanism versus vitalism, design versus selection. More than a critique, it represents a constructive and integrative step toward a paradigmatic shift in how we understand life's evolutionary unfolding.

The human race has been socially organizing itself for probably about 1.8 million years. The first form of human organization was the hunter-gatherer, which was the form of organization in which man lived for about 99 % of his history. This mode of life caused humans to organize themselves into small groups and lead a nomadic life. The nomadic life ensured that these groups had no possessions and no wealth could be accumulated. In this manner, this form of human organization ensured egalitarianism, a form of primitive communism. This changed dramatically with the development of agriculture in the so-called Neolithic Revolution in 10,000 BC. With the development of agriculture and the consequent development of technology, man became sedentary, the first towns were formed, and the class system made its appearance, that is, the separation between an administrative class and a productive class. The egalitarian and communist primitive society gave way to an increasingly centralized and hierarchical society. From network theory, they have been insisting for years on the benefits of the so-called scale-free networks, networks governed by certain privileged nodes called hubs. These networks are said to be slightly vulnerable and highly robust to errors. In this work, we perform a deep network analysis of a group of centralized-hierarchical networks and a group of decentralized-distributed networks. This work provides clear and compelling evidence that, contrary to what is maintained, decentralized-distributed networks are the least vulnerable and most robust networks, and are the networks that ensure an equitable and equal distribution of power and influence among their members. These results are analyzed in the context of network theory, and are discussed in relation to the theories of Jeremy Rifkin, Ernst Schumacher, Alexander Bogdanov and Aldous Huxley.

We live longing for a utopia. However, we live in increasingly dystopian times. Whenever we imagine possible futures, a continuity of human progress in the direction of greater scientific-technological development comes to mind. We are completely certain that the reason that brought us current modern science and technology will lead us to this utopia, to a promising future. There is an association as intimate as it is indubitable between future, progress, technoscience and utopia. Isn't it time to question this undisputed certainty? Is it true that reason, progress, science, technology and utopia will lead us to a healthy future for man and nature? Isn't it time to open our eyes and mind to see things differently? Isn't it time to stop frantically producing in pursuit of progress and take a rest to think? There is a fundamental and radical difference between reason and thinking. This book proposes a journey through the worlds of science fiction, utopianism, socialism, communism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, Zen Buddhism, art, medievalism, alchemy, science, technology and philosophy. This book proposes to abandon the utopian-dystopian reason to embrace the eutopian life, a new mode of existence in which man needs to regain his rootedness with Earth to be able to think again and live in harmony with himself and nature.

The question of life resists reduction: the more it is dissected into mechanisms, the farther we often move from its meaning. This essay argues that life should be understood as a path: an inwardly directed process — an unfolding of potential governed by formal, teleological principles — rather than as a set of inert biochemical facts. Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of psyche and entelechy, Hans Driesch’s embryological findings, and contemporary critiques of mechanistic science and capitalist life-organization, the essay proposes an epistemic and ethical reorientation: to know life we must listen to life’s language (feeling, direction, sense) and restore conditions that enable its flourishing. To operationalize this reorientation, the essay advances Euzoology — a life-centered science for a good living — which unites formal teleology, developmental dynamics, and an ethics of dwelling. Euzoology reframes questions of biology, social organization, and policy around the criteria of flourishing, coherence, and participation. The path of life is therefore both a philosophical discovery and a programmatic call: to recover forms of existence and knowledge that allow life to realize its intrinsic ends.

Has science already answered the fundamental questions about the concepts of Life, Cosmos and Evolution? Has science not relegated these fundamental questions by following up on more immediate, “useful” and practical endeavors that ultimately ensure that the wheel of capitalism keeps spinning in its frantic search for material and economic progress? There is something terribly wrong with the current theory of evolution, understood as the Darwinian theory with its successive versions and extensions. The concept of natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinism, is logically inconsistent. This has been demonstrated in some of my latest academic publications. The entire conceptual framework of Darwinism is inadequate. Organisms do not compete with each other for the survival of the fittest. The fundamental relationship in Nature is not competition or confrontation, but interconnectivity, complementarity, and relational meaningfulness. A new theory of evolution is necessary to explain how it is possible that organisms as simple as bacteria, protozoa and diatoms could have generated organisms as complex as primates, and among them, the human being, a being capable of feeling and thinking, of suffering and enjoying, a being capable of having ideals and purposes. A theory that explains how it is possible that this being so complex, rich, and to some extent still unknown, has emerged from a single cell, an egg-cell, lacking all the capacities, riches and depths of human existence. Such a theory already exists.

Is life a simple result of a conjunction of physico-chemical processes? Can be reduced to a mere juxtaposition of spatially determined events? What epistemology or world-view allows us to comprehend it? Aristotle built a novel philosophical system in which nature is a dynamical totality which is in constant movement. Life is a manifestation of it, and is formed and governed by the psyche. Psyche is the organizational principle of the different biological levels: nutritive, perceptive and intelective. Driesch's crucial experiment provided empirical proof of the principle of life, which he called entelechy. Entelechy is an intensive manifoldness and cannot be comprehended by the usual extensive parameters. The entelechian's own ambiance is duration. This allows the reintroduction of the concept of teleology in the sphere of the living, understood not as a final cause, but as an order born from desire and leading to action.

In this work I propose a theory of evolution as a process of unfolding. This theory is based on four logically concatenated principles. The principle of evolutionary order establishes that the more complex cannot be generated from the simpler. The principle of origin establishes that there must be a maximum complexity that originates the others by logical deduction. Finally, the principle of unfolding and the principle of actualization guarantee the development of the evolutionary process from the simplest to the most complex. These logical principles determine the existence of a virtual ideological matrix that contains the sequence of the preformed and folded morphogenetic fields. In this manner, the evolutionary process consists of the sequential unfolding and actualization of these fields, which is motorized by a process of teleologization carried out by the opening consciousness of the forms included in the fields of the ideological matrix. This theory leads to a radical change of perspective regarding the materialist worldview, and places life at the center of the evolutionary process as an activity carried out by a consciousness that seeks to fulfill a purpose by actualizing its own potentialities.

The organism against its environment. The organism against other organisms, competing and struggling for life. Antagonism and confrontment as the only possible relation in nature. The tendency to anthropomorphize nature and explain it using concepts and facts from the human sphere. A stroll through the worlds of Uexküll and Merleau-Ponty in the search of alternative knowledge that allow us to understand relation from another point of view. A counterpoint and identification of common tonalities between the research programs from both thinkers as a way to demonstrate the possibilities of a more fruitful approach. Umwelt as a generative system of meaningful relations in which its participants are not mutually exclusive, but express a melody that include them all.

What is the relation between science and ideology? Are they incompatible, complementary or the same thing? Should science avoid "contamination" from ideology? Is there an only way to do science? Does anyone of them lead to the same results and give us the same worldview? We will focus on the figure of Alexander Bogdanov, Russian physician and philosopher, in order to discuss these and other relevant topics. His theories gave birth to what may be called later "the theory of two sciences", which entitles this work.

What is the relation between science and ideology? Are they incompatible, complementary or the same thing? Should science avoid “contamination” from ideology? Is there an only way to do science? Does anyone of them lead to the same results and give us the same worldview? We will focus on the figure of Alexander Bogdanov, Russian physician and philosopher, in order to discuss these and other relevant topics. His theories gave birth to what may be called later “the theory of two sciences”, which entitles this work.

The influence of Kurt Goldstein on the thinking of Georges Canguilhem extended throughout his entire work. This paper seeks to examine this relationship in order to conduct a study of the norm as a nexus or connection between the concept and life. Consequently, this work will be a reflection on the approach to life as a normative activity and self-realization. For this, it will be necessary to redefine the concepts of health and disease, and make a crossover between the two. At the end of this trajectory, it will be found that these concepts can explain the identity between the concept and life, which leads to the unexpected conclusion that the cure is ultimately self-healing.

Life is the center of our existence. One would be tempted to say that first of all we live. However, our existence does not seem to pass in that modality. The exacerbated materialism in which our existence takes place, displaces life from the center of the scene. Our society is organized around production, consumerism, exploitation, efficiency, trade and propaganda. That is to say, our existence seems to have economy as the center of organization of our activities. The struggle of this century that is beginning is to put life at the center of our existence, and to put economy in its proper place, that is, in the service of life.

The topic of the relationship between the organism and its environment runs through the theories of Uexküll, Goldstein and Canguilhem with equal importance. In this work a counterpoint will be established between their theories, in the attempt to assess at which points the melodies are concordant and at which points they are discordant. As fundamental basis to his theory, Uexküll relies on the concept of conformity to a plan, which allows him to account for the congruity and perfect adjustment between organisms and their Umwelten. For Goldstein and Canguilhem, the relationship between an organism and its environment resembles instead a debate or coming to terms, in which the organism, as to ensure the continuity of the state of health, must constantly create norms to maintain a productive relationship with its environment. The pinpointing of these conceptual frameworks allows to lay emphasis on that each theory relies on specific assumptions regarding teleology and sense in organisms, as well as on specific definitions of the concept of life in general. Ultimately, the view that organisms and their environments have an original and common source, a principle, or plan, which must possess all the creative characteristics of life, will be seen as prevailing.

In this work the doctrine of organicism will be addressed, as explained and seen mainly by Bertalanffy. We will study how this doctrine represents and embodies the ambiguity of Kantian teleology as a regulative principle, and how this same problem leads to consider a real problem as a knowledge problem. It will be concluded that organicism, conceived in this way, does not represent a true holism, but what we will call a syn-holism, a synthesis or assembly, and that to obtain a true holism we must resort to the concept of true form. Finally, it will be established that since the fundamental characteristic of an organism is its development, a historical theory of the organism is required for which the concept of field can be useful and necessary.

The modern concept of ideology was established by the liberal politician and philosopher Destutt de Tracy, with the objective of creating an all-embracing and general science of ideas, which followed the sensualist and empiricist trend initiated by Locke that culminated in the positivism of Comte. Natural selection and immunity are two key concepts in the history of biology that were strongly based on the Malthusian concept of struggle for existence. This concept wrongly assumed that population grew faster than the means of existence. This “natural” law contained implicitly the idea that the poor and least gifted would not survive. This idea led to the progressive development of the concept of natural selection, whose definitive version was given by Darwin. Mechnikov took the concepts of struggle for existence and natural selection and conceived infectious diseases as a struggle between a host and its invader, the so-called phagocytosis theory. This theory created the necessity to possess mechanisms to discriminate between the own and the foreign, and led to the conception of the immune self. These concepts were not developed from ideas coming from perceptions or sensations, but from ideas coming from their values: individual interest, inevitable inequality, property, utility and profit. Values are ideals that constitute an ideological matrix which exerts a numinous activity and influence the development of our future actions. In consequence, science and its practice cannot avoid and ignore the values that drive them and impulse them towards certain directions.

This is an epistemologically-driven history of the concept of evolution. Starting from its inception, this work will follow the development of this pregnant concept. However, in contradistinction to previous attempts, the objective will not be the identification of the different meanings it adopted through history, but conversely, it will let the concept to be unfolded, to be explicated and to express its own inner potentialities. The underlying thesis of the present work is, therefore, that the path that leads to the development of the concept of evolution is the path that studies the possibilities of the evolution of concepts, and that the historical reconstruction of its conceptual trajectory will shed light into potential and unexploited possibilities. This methodology will provide useful tools and resources for future developments of the concept. For example, it will define the concept of transmutation as a different conceptual trajectory deviating from the one corresponding to evolution, at the onset of the 19th century. Moreover, epigenesis will not be the opposing concept to evolution, but only to simultaneous and instantaneous generation. It will demonstrate that every important system of epigenesis drew upon some kind of formative power to explain development. More importantly, it will show that the problem of preformation cannot be overlooked, and that some kind of virtual preformation must be considered in order to address the problems of generation and development.