Chapter 1: The New Biology
5 - Metamorphosis
The criticism began soon after the start of the machine age. Faith in mechanism and reduction had gained the high ground in science, but doubts were being raised in philosophy and the arts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was notable among the skeptics. So was William Wordsworth, who wrote:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant added his voice to the dissenters, pointing out what he saw as a disconnect between mechanical explanations and how living things really work. In both systems, he said, the parts interact; but in organisms the parts also create one another. Which means that a life form, as he put it in his Critique of Judgment, is “both an organized and self-organizing being.” This is arguably the first appearance of the term “self-organizing” in a description of living systems, a term now prominent in the most advanced speculations on the subject.
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the great Romantic poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made a major contribution to biology with his concept of “morphology.” He suggested that all the parts of a plant are just manifestations of a single deeper pattern, one apparent in its leaves. In his view, that pattern moved through a series of transformations as different structures—leaves, flower petals, stamens—came into being. The process, he said, was similar to the changes an insect goes through during metamorphosis. Goethe saw that as evidence of nature’s “moving order.” His insight anticipated by two centuries the current view of life forms as coherent patterns through which energy and materials flow.
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