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The dailygalaxy article makes it sound like this phenomenon is completely baffling to scientists - my first thought as I read it was "vitalism", they seemed to be saying that the sequence recognition just happens by magic. In fact, though, the original paper discusses at least two possible mechanisms.
Perhaps there's still something to vitalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Driesch#Experiments_in_emb...

Experiment showing that irregardless of sea-urchin embryo part grown, it still developed into a full sea-urchin. Hans Driersch thought this evidence of some kind of vitalism in nature.

He basically discovered multipotent stem cells. No magic in sight. Nothing related to long standing superstitons either.
This is completely new!