The prior history of an organization (its epigenetic history) specifies not only physical characteristics but in addition its underlying epigenetic landscape which is the summation of previous generations' success and failure in interacting with the environment. This is characterized by the epithet 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'. Ontogenic recapitulation of phylogeny is also a property of evolving systems whose descriptions are stored in a process language (as with biological organisms) such that in their development they go through stages that resemble some of the forms of their evolutionary ancestors.