Self-Organisation Guided by Developmental Scaffoldings

A new study published on arXiv (2605.14998) explores how biological systems offload information to initial conditions to guide self-organisation. The authors argue that from subcellular structures to entire organisms, natural systems generate complex organisation through local interactions without a blueprint. However, much of the driving information is not produced by self-organisation itself but is encoded in initial conditions, such as maternal pre-patterns in biological development. These pre-patterns, including morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis and tissue-level morphogenetic patterns, act as scaffoldings that guide the self-organising process. The work introduces a model to study this offloading phenomenon, drawing an analogy to memory-compute trade-offs in computational systems.