Bruce 2013 Concepto Organismo Evolcion

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REVIEW ARTICLE

A reflection on biological thought: whatever happenedto the organism?

ROBIN W. BRUCE*

20 Pickwick Road, London SE21 7JW, UK

Received 24 May 2013; revised 9 August 2013; accepted for publication 9 August 2013

Biological thought requires at least both a concept of organism and a concept of evolution to be causally efficient;

this is above and beyond any materialistic cause or causes, however formulated. Although the concept of evolutionhas been much debated and developed over the last century and a half, the concept of organism has been neglected,despite promising modern beginnings with the works of W. E. Ritter and others. The independent efforts of fivebiologists, including Ritter, to develop a concept of organism are outlined, key works are cited, and somesimilarities and differences of their approaches are outlined. E. S. Russells teleology of organism, far from beinga failed worldview, is considered to be a major significant step towards a more complete biology. 2013 TheLinnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2013, , .

ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS: Agnes Arber E. S. Russell J. H. Woodger Kurt Goldstein materialism mechanism teleology W. E. Ritter.

INTRODUCTION

The present essay was inspired by two meetings at

the Linnean Society of London in 2011: Strain-

induced assembly hypothesis and the growth of form

(24 March 2011), organized for David Knight by

David Cutler and Andrew Packard, and The role of

behaviour in evolution (8 September 2011). Both

meetings addressed aspects of possible intrinsic

exploration and explanation of problems associated

with organisms and their organization, rather than

the currently more usual approach of extrinsic expla-

nation for organismal form, function, and existence.

Both meetings concerned themselves with a welcome

return to the organism after what seems a very longdigression during which organisms have been rel-

egated to the status of billiard balls set in motion

solely by the action of external evolutionary forces. In

point of fact, organisms are active, maintaining,

growing, developing, and reproducing entities. Fur-

thermore, organisms display an endless continuity

and are capable, in part, of continually choosing paths

at the spatial and temporal edges to their own

futures, albeit for brief durations only, and of uncer-

tain consequences.

What follows are some reflections on the history of

certain ideas in biology for the period 19191954,

framed by the writings of W. E. Ritter, commencing

with his organismal conception expounded in The

Unity of the Organism (Ritter, 1919b), and concluding

with the posthumous publication of Charles Darwin

and the Golden Rule (Ritter, 1954). The latter

includes a full bibliography of Ritters written works.

THE ROOTS OF AN IDEA

The main idea herein traced is that of the organismal

conception but not, for example as Mayr (1997) cat-

egorized it, as organicism, an abstraction or exten-

sion, or as systems theory, another extension, which

von Bertalanffy (1952) would ultimately fashion from

a similar starting point to Ritters, or as holism as

developed by Smuts (1926), yet another abstraction.

This organismal conception, or to use Ritters phrase

the unity of the organism is rather just deep reflec-

tion on the concrete nature of the organism and of the*E-mail: [email protected]

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necessity of such a concept in any significant greater

biology. A large part of the biology of the last 150

years has centred, not surprisingly, on species and

their origins (i.e. an evolutionary concept concerning

the change of collectives through time); however, such

an approach presupposes that organisms as individu-

als and their continuity are both real and actual andthis too must be considered in any analysis and

possible attempted synthesis.

If the present review has any aim beyond exposing

the thoughts and writings of an extraordinary collec-

tion of biologists to those as yet perhaps unfamiliar

with them and their works, it would be that of stress-

ing the necessity of the concept of organism in any

framework of biology. This might seem a strange or

even foolish aim; surely organisms are always under-

stood to be the substrate and essence of biology? But

are they? Or are we just confusing means and ends

here? Is not the concept of the billiard ball more

convenient and less demanding for our explorationsand our explanations? The evolutionary meta-

narrative has, for better or worse, become our only

intellectual explanation of life in its many forms,

although the fact that life presents itself always as

organisms remains curiously understated. Life is a

property of organisms, and organisms alone, as far as

we know, bear this property. Conversely, concrete

organisms are not a property of abstract life but

rather part of an unbroken continuity of unknown

duration. Unless we wish to return to animism in

some form or other, we just have to acknowledge that

life, in general and in particular, always resides in

organisms. The organism as a concept in biology wasnot always overlooked and understated, as the efforts

of the subjects of this essay bear witness.

Without a concept of organism, biology is much

diminished, and fractures into competing cults of

artefacts and abstractions. This is not to say that

biology is sufficient as an intellectual pursuit with

only the concept of organism but rather that, without

this concept, there is nothing to hang disparate cat-

egories, threads, narratives, theories, and abstrac-

tions on, and they drift and recede into the reified

ether and beyond. Without the organism, there are no

knots in the nexus. Rather than a dialogue with

reality, we content ourselves with embracing abstrac-tion, and then praise our efforts in so doing; organ-

isms alone allow our biology to be grounded in

endless, renewing and continuous actuality and, as

such, the organism is a category of nature above and

beyond any material considerations of its parts.

The concept of organism was most clearly developed

in biological thought within this period by Ritter and

many others, and then appears largely to have been

forgotten. This loss of concept of organism appears

coincidental with the development of the modern syn-

thesis. For example, the works of John Scott Haldane

spanning the first few decades of the 20th Century

are replete with considerations of the nature of organ-

isms (Haldane, 1929) but, in the key work of Huxley

(1942), even the term organism, as a concept, is

absent from the subject index. Moreover, the thoughts

of J. S. Haldane are not cited therein but, instead,those of his son, J. B. S. Haldane, are now brought to

the fore. I am not arguing for a simple cause and

effect here, just noting that as evolution as a concept

expanded, it appeared that organism as a concept

contracted. I do not believe this to be a wholly intel-

lectually balanced state of affairs.

The five biologists considered in this account are

William Emerson Ritter, Kurt Goldstein, Agnes Arber,

Edward Stuart Russell, and Joseph Henry Woodger. A

naive classification would list them as three zoologists

(Ritter, Russell, Woodger), a botanist (Arber), and a

physician (Goldstein). Many others should also be

included, although my lack of knowledge and spacelimitations require the present circumscription. J. S.

Haldane and Ludwig von Bertalanffy already men-

tioned above, and Conwy Lloyd Morgan and Joseph

Needham immediately come to mind as requiring

further consideration within this arena of ideas.

Indeed, Needham appears to manage to be both for

and against the concept of organism in his writings of

this period, an ambivalence that might reward close

scrutiny. But it must be left to another essay or to

others to pursue the efforts of these biologists. The

largely Anglo-Saxon outlook is a result of my linguis-

tic and cultural parochialisms, and my failure to

embrace the world of micro-organisms is another sig-nificant limitation. These shortcomings withstanding,

I have come to the belief that, if one scratches the

surface of biology in any culture or language during

this period, approximately 19191954, evidence of a

concept of organism would be quickly exposed. Thus,

my chosen five are in effect exemplars of a widespread

approach to biology now largely in eclipse. As such,

the five do present service for the past efforts of the

many. Their efforts are both real and substantial but

now carelessly overlooked. All five had more than

sufficient ability to let their written works continue to

speak for themselves. The diversity of outlooks that

the five had on organisms are, I believe, refreshingand stimulating, and serve as a balance against the

current monopoly of evolutionary materialism.

VITALISM, MATERIALISM, AND ORGANISM

The beginnings of any continuity must be problem-

atic; this is as true for organisms as it is for ideas.

Perhaps Hans Drieschs Gifford Lectures 19061908,

published as The Science and Philosophy of the

Organism (Driesch, 1908), or indeed Henri Bergsons

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Creative Evolution (Bergson, 1911; in English trans-

lation) might have warranted consideration as just

such beginnings. These works certainly shaped the

field where vitalism met materialism. But I think

that Ritter serves as the best exemplar for

re-developing the concept of the organism as some-

thing more expansive than materialism and mecha-nism, and yet more concrete than the vitalism of

Driesch and Bergson. Although Ritter was instrumen-

tal in moving biology past that limiting and limited

antithesis, the fact that, by default, we continue to

return to the antithesis suggests that we have paid

scant attention to Ritters lead. The world we all live

in is, proximally, distally and ultimately, a world of

organisms. Perhaps this is just a self-evident truth,

although it does reflect the reality of our past, present

and possible future existence, and we can only inter-

act with the world by being organisms ourselves;

something Ritter wrote about in detail during the

later years of his life and formed the basis ofGoldsteins biological method.

As an aside, perhaps Descartes should be considered

as the primordium for a modern conception of organ-

ism with cogito, ergo sum, at least with respect to

humans; existence and organism were thereby fused.

It remains an irony of both history and Descartes

metaphysics that dualism remains his enduring bio-

logical contribution down to the present. Alas, there

was man and then the rest of nature in his taxonomy

of the world of beings (and regrettably Darwins

insights lay unattainable in future time). Descartes

divisions of nature thus still arrest biological develop-

ment. Yet these divisions reveal the remarkable rela-tionship between a false natural classification and the

development of thought. It is an example of the prob-

lems that arise from embracing the fallacy of the

bifurcation of nature (rather than a laudable bifurca-

tion of thought) as exposed by Whitehead (1920).

By 1960, the concept of organism had fallen from

intellectual interest, with the molecule (we all know

which one), the gene, the cell, the system, including

the ecosystem, phylogenetics and, most recently,

informatics, now vying to fill our biological gaze, all

operating under some form of a concept of evolution.

Perhaps it is little wonder that we have no time or

space any more for a concept of organism in thiscrowded intellectual world. The practical world

cannot allow itself such self-indulgence; ask the plant

and animal breeders, the fisherman, the pharmacolo-

gist, and the sewage engineer: in their real world,

continuity of variety, breed, species, strain or culture

must be maintained. Indeed any concept of evolution

requires, as a necessary corollary, a concept of organ-

ism; the former concept is a theoretical postulate

concerning time, space and the ultimate causes of

change in collectives, the latter concerns the empiri-

cal and proximal reality of individual continuity of

living beings: the theory and the practice of life,

respectively. The times under consideration are then

the second to sixth decades of the 20th Century; less

than half a century of concerted intellectual effort as

evidenced by the works of Ritter, Goldstein, Arber,

Russell, and Woodger. The degree of direct interactionbetween these individuals and their detailed inter-

relationships are not pursued to any extent here.

Indeed, such an undertaking would be a huge task,

although there was interaction. However, I do not

suggest that there was a concerted and conscious

unity of purpose in their efforts; they were merely

explorers of organisms, which they found to be eter-

nally fascinating.

My purpose is to note that the concept of organism

was something in the air during this period, to

celebrate the efforts of these biologists to pin the

concept down and to give it intellectual form, and to

give an indication of works that can be consulted byany reader moved, like me, to acknowledge the extraor-

dinary contributions of these five during this period.

Beyond their contributions, the loss of their ideas and

with it a loss of continuity into modern intellectual

culture is both disappointing and troubling. Disap-

pointments can of course be reduced by replaying them

through remembrance and finally dispelled by renais-

sance. But, if something as necessary, articulate,

rational, reasonable, empirical, sane, and concrete as

the concept of organism can disappear almost without

trace and comment from mainstream biology, what

does it say about our resolve, our science, and ulti-

mately our values? Why did this happen? For thepresent, I only speculate; at an immediate level model

organisms and shallow intellectual models impoverish

biology, albeit unconsciously. Technicism, the appeal of

novelty and specialization fracture biology. The title of

Agnes Arbers final book, The Manifold and the One,

directs us to what biological thought ought to be but

seldom is. Perhaps, at a deeper level, evolutionary

materialism was allowed to gain a monopoly of the

mind, a monopoly to which we have all contributed. In

the final analysis, a scientific theory which explains

everything explains nothing.

I therefore found it encouraging that the Linnean

Society of London hosted two meetings in 2011 thatplaced organisms, once again, front of stage as indi-

vidual concrete beings, and the metaphysical and

abstract outlooks of much of current biology were

challenged.

TELEGRAPHIC SKETCHES OF THE FIVE

W. E. RITTER, 18561944

Ritters long life and career demonstrates a restless

mind searching always for areas for further growth,

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE ORGANISM? 3



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be it personal, institutional, professional, national

or international. First and foremost, he was a

general zoologist, reflecting always on the organismal

nature of life: fishes, frogs, newts, snakes, lizards,

birds, echinoderms, hemichordates, although mostly

ascidians, colonial and solitary, were held in the gaze

of his researches. Description, definition, and classi-fication were the foundations of his knowledge but he

refused to stop there; the organism in its environment

was always part of his philosophy of zoology. Thus,

the need for a marine laboratory on the Californian

coast became a further quest, and the result grew into

what would become Scripps Institution of Oceanogra-

phy. The need for the proper dissemination of scien-

tific results to a wide audience also animated him,

and the result was the Science Service. Humans as

part of the natural order of life caused him to reflect

on human nature from a zoological perspective, and

he was a strong advocate of the League of Nations

after the First World War. In a time of possibleidealism, he was an American Idealist but with a

thoroughgoing realistic streak born out of scientific

scepticism and social pragmatism, especially when

considering the nature of the human animal; progress

was possible but not inevitable, and ideology, any

ideology, was repugnant to him.

The concept of the organism in its modern form

belongs to Ritter (Russell, 1930); contra Descartes

universe, all life forms were now a conjoined unity. An

online bibliography (Ollhoff, 2013) and a brief biogra-

phy (Day, 2006) are available. The titles of his books

surely must intrigue biologists to at least browse his

contributions, which are profound and humanitarian,in a way that few biologists of any age could match:

War, Science and Civilization (Ritter, 1915); The

Higher Usefulness of Science (Ritter, 1918a); The

Probable Infinity of Nature and Life (Ritter, 1918b);

An Organismal Theory of Consciousness (Ritter,

1919a); The Unity of the Organism (Ritter, 1919b);

The Natural History of Our Conduct (Ritter, 1927,

with E. W. Bailey); The Californian Woodpecker and I

(Ritter, 1938); and Charles Darwin and the Golden

Rule (Ritter, 1954, with E. W. Bailey). Ritters ability

to hold up a mirror to the human organism, especially

himself, identifies him as a remarkable zoologist.

As a marine biologist, Ritter found much compat-ibility with Aristotles life and the latters world view,

and especially with the concept of entelecheia, which

Ritter considered best translated as complete reality.

Two brief statements of Ritters are worth recalling.

His political philosophy, if it may be so called, is

summed up in the preface in The Unity of the Organ-

ism thus:

The reason why sincere humility and the spirit of democracy

are alien to all forms of idealistic philosophy becomes clear

once one attains a world view which truly strives to include,

but makes no pretense to having already included, the whole

world wholly in that view (Ritter, 1919b: xviii)

Some decades later, Karl Popper, echoing Ritter,

would describe idealistic philosophy as the enemy of

the open society. The second quote sums up Ritters

biological philosophy, if it may be so called, againfrom the introductory section of The Unity:

. . . the organism in its totality is as essential to an explana-

tion of its elements as its elements are to an explanation of the

organism (Ritter, 1919b: 24)

For Ritter, no simple materialistic chain of temporal

causality was therefore sufficient for the explanation

of living things. What was necessary for Ritter was a

reciprocation between the materials of the parts and

the organism and the organism and the materials of

the parts.

Although Ritters views, by his own consent, can

ultimately be located in the tensions between theconcept of organism of Aristotle and the elementalism

of Lucretius, more proximal influences are to be found

in the efforts of three American biologists, C. O.

Whitman, E. B. Wilson, and F. R. Lillie to pursue and

attempt to clarify the relationships between cells,

embryos, and organisms. These relationships would

be returned to again and again by Ritter, Russell, and

Woodger with, I believe, penetrating insight.

K. GOLDSTEIN, 18781965

Goldstein was principally a physician, neurologist

and psychologist, and influenced much of mid-20thCentury psychology, although little of the biology of

this period, which is truly unfortunate. Anyone who

wrote a text entitled The Organism (first German

edition 1934) that still remains in print (Goldstein,

1995), deserves significant recognition in the biologi-

cal thought of any subsequent times. What current

biological interest there is for Goldstein centres on

holism (Holdrege, 1999a, b). But before expanding

thought to holism, the empiricism of the organism,

and all that that entails, must be acknowledged.

In this writers view, Goldsteins life and career

were about exploring the reality of the organism,

especially with respect to human mental disabilitiesand what such clinical cases can reveal about the

normal human organism. His studies on brain-

damaged World War I veterans at the outset might

appear worthy but limited, although, in the hands of

Goldstein, this work grew to be expansive, trenchant,

and penetrating, in ways unmatched by any initial

expectations. Goldstein demonstrated what nature

can tell us if we are humble enough to listen to its

quiet messages; the biological roots of humans as

organisms and their potential for individual growth

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as human beings, irrespective of the severity of their

limitations, illuminate his writings. Goldsteins

defiant humanity is well displayed in his William

James Lectures Human Nature in the Light of Psy-

chopathology delivered at Harvard in 1940, and pub-

lished thus (Goldstein, 1940). Russell refers to this

work in the appendix to his final presidential address,on the behaviour of animals, made to the Linnean

Society in 1943 (Russell, 1944).

The preface to the German edition ofThe Organism

(reprinted in the 1995 English edition) outlines

Goldsteins clinical philosophy:

The intention to write this book goes back many years. It

dates to that time of the world war when it became my special

task as a physician to take under my medical care a great

many patients with lesions of the brain. As a director of a

hospital for brain-injured soldiers, my experiences compelled

me to broaden the medical frame of reference to a more

biological orientation. It soon became evident that only the

biological approach is adequate to evaluate the changes which

these suffering fellow men have undergone; moreover, the

facts taught me that there was no other procedure available

which could render aid, however imperfect, to these patients

(Goldstein, 1995: 15)

Some three decades later Goldstein again stressed the

nature of his biological method:

. . . this would not change the books [The Organism] essential

character, which consists not so much in the communication of

facts as in the clarification of the problem of method in

biological research and in elucidating ways of conceptualizing

the empirical material (Goldstein, in the authors preface to

the 1963 edition, reprinted in Goldstein, 1995: 17)

Goldsteins concern with the nature of the individual,

whether it be normal or pathological, from a biological

standpoint, finds little echo in most contemporary

biology where the fitness of the collective has become

the ready explanation for all biological realities, and

the adaptiveness and adaptability of the individual

organism within its own lifetime has been conveni-

ently overlooked.

Goldstein (1940) attempts to root humans to their

biological past as organisms and to consider their

potential as human beings as organisms; of the

former we can know about, of the latter we havethe possibility of understanding. From understand-

ing ourselves, we can then explore other organisms;

from such a standpoint, from viewing all living

forms as the organisms that they are, Goldsteins

biology thus takes on a radical perspective. It is an

enquiry into biology via the organism that one has

the greatest possibility of understanding (ones

self) and from there one can explore the rest of the

world of life-forms. Written by someone who was

hounded from his native soil, who had his career

abruptly shattered, who had seen co-workers and

colleagues killed, and who faced an uncertain future

at an uncertain time in western civilization, this

text is a remarkable combination of positive

thought, unyielding humanitarianism and scientific

virtuosity.

A. ARBER, 18791960

Of the five, Arber is probably the most appreciated

currently. She has had a significant influence

on botanical thought, and this continues and

indeed deepens (Barlow, Lck & Lck, 2001;

Claen-Bockhoff, 2001; Rutishauser & Isler, 2001),

and she has been well served by biographies and

bibliographies (Thomas, 1960; Packer, 1997). Her

knowledge of botanical history was extensive and

provided her with deep foundations for her later

researches and speculations. Artistic training by her

father, a professional artist, greatly aided her botani-cal presentations and influenced her later biological

epistemology, reflected in her chosen title for this

work The Mind and the Eye. Working institutionally,

then privately on botanical history, plant morphology,

and growth, and finally by thought alone, she pon-

dered the nature of botanical form in a way that few

others have done, to a depth few could consider. The

later publications on the natural philosophy of plant

form, origins, and methods of biological knowledge,

and, finally, the metaphysics of existence, are roads

largely untravelled, even unconsidered by most

modern biologists. Her continual awareness of the

limits of language, especially when confronted withthe germinative nature of life (in the bud) serves as

an eternal caution to scientific aggrandizement, espe-

cially true now in the age of the algorithm, when

information and language have become conflated, and

it has become easy to pretend that machines do our

thinking and talking.

Arber was a Linnean Society gold medallist in

1948. Her plant books remain part of the botanical

canon; for the benefit of nonbotanists, they include

Herbals (Arber, 1912; and subsequent reprintings);

Water Plants: A Study of Aquatic Angiosperms (Arber,

1920); Monocotyledons: A Morphological Study

(Arber, 1925); The Gramineae: A Study of Cereal,Bamboo, and Grass (Arber, 1934); and The Natural

Philosophy of Plant Form (Arber, 1950). Her later

speculations into the nature of biological knowledge,

The Mind and the Eye, A Study of the Biologists

Standpoint (Arber, 1954), and metaphysics, The

Manifold and the One (Arber, 1957), are products of a

critical, reflective, and mature mind drawing on vast

biological knowledge gained over many decades.

Arbers outlook on biology is demonstrated in her

preface to The Gramineae:




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. . . I wish to stress the fact that this is only one of numberless

possible books, for which, to different minds, the grasses

might supply material. I have of the Grass, as Coleridge had

of the Rose-tree, a distinct Thought, but I am continually

conscious of his unanswered question what countless prop-

erties and goings-on of that plant are there, not included in

my Thought of it? (Arber, 1934: x)

and in the closing lines of the same work:

What is the meaning of the differences that separate the

Gramineae so delicately, yet so definitely, from any other

order, and that so prevail that a grass remains a grass,

however freely the type may vary? To attribute these differ-

ences to genic constitution is an explanation of a merely

descriptive kind; it enables us, indeed, to assign a place to

them in the mental framework which we impose upon reality,

but in so doing we have shelved, not solved, the problem. The

mystery abides (Arber, 1934: 409)

The exploration of the continuity of the rhymes and

rhythms of organisms are Agnes Arbers enduringcontribution to biological thought. The breadth and

depth of her readings and writings are a sobering

reminder of the nature of true scholarship in our age

dominated by pervasive ideology and universal

technicism. Her considerations of the reticulate

nature of many of lifes relationships serve as a criti-

cal counterpoint to the current prevailing model of

phylogenetic bifurcation, and strengthen and deepen

any appreciation of organisms and their connections.

With increasing evidence of lateral gene transfer

between micro-organisms, Arbers insights into bio-

logical forms and their reticulations now appear fresh

and felicitous when viewed against the linear modelof bifurcation.

E. S. RUSSELL, 18871954

Russells perceptiveness is well displayed in his first

book, Form and Function, A Contribution to Animal

Morphology (Russell, 1916), which is a critique and

appraisal of biological thought from classical begin-

nings to the 20th Century. Russells own education

was both classical and biological, and perhaps

accounts for the success of this historical commentary.

Lauder (1982) presents an interesting essay on thiswork and its continuing relevance to biology in the

1982 reprint, with a bibliography of Russells contri-

butions. Russell worked as a fisheries biologist but

this practical vocation did not prevent his contempla-

tion and pursuit of what was to be his lifes work:

attempting to understand organisms as functioning

wholes, and attempting to create a free biology, free

from the strictures of materialistic thought, thereby

raising biology to an appreciation and an interpreta-

tion of the organism.

Russell, President of the Linnean Society of London

19401943, wrote a series of books that have yet to be

fully appreciated for their originality and clarity of

thought. A biographer with the ability to take on his

life and works is now needed to distil that originality

and clarity for modern readers to appreciate. Russells

works include, in addition to Form and Function, TheStudy of Living Things: Prolegomena to a Functional

Biology (Russell, 1924); The Interpretation of Devel-

opment and Heredity: A Study in Biological Method

(Russell, 1930); The Behaviour of Animals: An Intro-

duction to its Study (Russell, 1934); The Overfishing

Problem (Russell, 1942); The Directiveness of Organic

Activities (Russell, 1945); and, posthumously, The

Diversity of Animals: An Evolutionary Study (Russell,

1962).

Ulett (2010) gives a brief but instructive biographic

sketch. Russell is too easily dismissed as a teleologist

by evolutionary biologists, although this is to misun-

derstand the nature of his teleology. For Russell, theteleology of the organism was a logical necessity born

of the very nature of the organism and just had to be

accepted as such; this perhaps is a classical view

point that is now too far out of touch with modern

material sensibilities. That materialism cannot

survive with teleology was of little import for Russell

but that the organism cannot survive without teleol-

ogy was his lasting contribution to biological thought.

For Russell, organisms do not only encapsulate

material within their boundaries. Organisms also

encapsulate time and space within themselves and

self-generate directiveness, be it towards mainte-

nance, adaptation or reproduction. Without signifi-cant biographical reappraisal, such insights are likely

to languish in the shadows of current evolutionary

hegemony, and biology will remain but half a science

and entirely a slave to materialism.

The last book by Russell published during his life-

time was The Directiveness of Organic Activities. The

preface outlines Russells intent, in the plainest of

language:

This book is an experiment or adventure in biological thought.

I have tried to work out the consequences of rejecting the

mechanistic point of view in biology, and I have, not unnatu-

rally, arrived at a conception of the living organism and a

method for Biology which are entirely heterodox, and run

counter to the ideas commonly accepted in the present theory

and practice in biology. My rejection of mechanism is quite

deliberate and for a good cause. The living thing can be

treated as a physico-chemical system or mechanism of great

complexity, and no one would dream of denying the validity

and value of biochemical and biophysical research. But such

an approach leaves out of account all that is distinctive of life,

the directiveness, orderliness and creativeness of organic

activities, and completely disregards its psychological aspect.

I try to show that we cannot disregard these unique charac-

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teristics of life without losing all hope of building up a unified,

coherent and independent biology (Russell, 1945: viii)

This book concludes:

Our conclusion that life processes are essentially and funda-

mentally directive and creative may be rejected as metaphysi-

cal or mystical. It is of course nothing of the sort. I make

no hypothesis as to the philosophical basis or ground of

directiveness or creativeness. I merely accept the patent evi-

dence that they are characteristic of living things and of them

alone. Nor do I suggest anything strange in the way of

method. I suggest simply that, instead of making continual

and vain efforts to squeeze biological facts within the mate-

rialistic frame, and attempting analysis without end, we

accept them as biological, that we deal with the problems of

development, maintenance and reproduction in terms of the

observable activities of the organic agents concerned, without

making the gratuitous hypothesis that these activities are

mechanistic. Only in this way can we hope to establish the

laws of organic activity (Russell, 1945: 192)

Russells quest for a free biology has but barely

started, although he outlined the route on the clearest

of maps. Esposito (2013) gives an extensive commen-

tary and analysis of Russells synthesis, an unmodern

synthesis in Espositos terms, which requires careful

reading but from which I gain succour for my appre-

ciations of Russells unique contributions to biological

thought.

J. H. WOODGER, 18941981

Woodgers lifes work could be summarized as the

pursuit and capture of the logic of the organism. Thatlife embraced teaching biology especially to medical

students, descriptive and experimental embryological

research, biological philosophy, philosophical biology,

language and biology, and their interrelationships. In

my view, his attempts to create a core of biological

principles (Woodger, 1929) have yet to be superseded.

Gregg & Harris (1964) edited a volume of studies

dedicated to Woodger on the occasion of his seventieth

birthday, including his curriculum vitae and a full

bibliography of his published writings. The breadth

and depth of the contributions to this volume by

colleagues and friends is testament to the regard

in which Woodger was held. Hull (1988) also addsinteresting comments on Woodgers contributions to

biology, as does Hall (1992). Woodgers paradox is

reviewed and resolved (though not to Halls or the

present writers satisfaction) by Medawar & Medawar

(1983: 281282); the paradox concerns how one taxon

becomes another taxon (i.e. how is the baton of lifes

continuity passed on via individual organisms, and

how do we demarcate the taxa so created).

Woodgers books represent a remarkably successful

attempt to wrestle logic from the cacophony of

organisms and their intrinsic and extrinsic connec-

tions immaterial, material and organismal, and

include Elementary Morphology and Physiology for

Medical Students (Woodger, 1924); Biological Princi-

ples: A Critical Study (Woodger, 1929); The Axiomatic

Method in Biology (Woodger, 1937); Biology and Lan-

guage (Woodger, 1952); and Physics, Psychology andMedicine: A Methodological Essay (Woodger, 1956).

Woodger concluded Biological Principles with a

chapter titled The Future of Biology. One arresting

sentence reads:

Clearly one of the most interesting and important problems

for the biology of the future is that of the relation of charac-

ters to parts, of genetic factors to developmental processes,

of the persistent racial immanent endowment to the process in

which it is displayed in the course of temporal passage

(Woodger, 1929: 484)

These problems still seem to lie in the future. But

Woodger also gave the means by which substantialprogress in biology will accrue. The lines are again to

be found in the final chapter of Biological Principles:

What biology requires is a better ventilation of its thought and

a more critical scrutiny of its concepts; more openmindedness

and more careful consideration of the relation between inves-

tigation and theoretical interpretation. But above all we need

a wider recognition of the value of thought itself . . . In biology

we require to think primarily about biological facts, not about

hypothetical billiard balls. But even thinking about biological

facts is not enough. We must scrutinize our ways of thinking

too, in order to try to overcome the limitations of those two

grooves into which thought has been confined since Descartes,

from which it has resulted that a specifically biological way ofthinking has hardly been so much as considered (Woodger,

1929: 486)

Central to any biological way of thinking must be

a concept of organism. In Biological Principles,

Woodger cleared a path towards that concept.

ARE THERE ANY CHARACTERISTICSSHARED BY THESE BIOLOGISTS?

It appears to me that the five shared a profound

contemplation of the nature of the organism, as

shown in their many and varied writings, from manysources, viewpoints, and perspectives. Their common

inspiring principle was the belief that the organism

must ultimately be understood as a living, function-

ing whole. They all acknowledged that, although

reductionism as a method is necessary, productive,

and unavoidable, the sterility of a reductionist phi-

losophy and the resultant totalitarian expansion to a

world view must be guarded against. The five dem-

onstrate that a variety of views and perspectives are

necessary if the study of organisms is not to be




8/12

hollowed out and reduced to the banal pointlessness

of studying the abstraction without the being. All

these biologists recognized organisms, including

humans, as ends in themselves, and thus worthy of

contemplation and study, and not just as means to

justify theoretical fashions, intellectual whims and a

current meta-narrative.Another characteristic shared by the five was a

resistance to move the organism from the foreground

of their thought. It is important to stress they are not

really organicists or holists but rather explorers of

the organism, in the full sense of the terms. What

was to be understood were organisms, not abstrac-

tions about organisms. In von Bertalanffys later

writing, he used organisms to develop his theory of

general systems, with general systems becoming the

foreground of his thought; however much merit there

might be in general systems theory, the organism has

been displaced.

All were also generalists as well as specialists, asany consideration of their published works will show;

they were biologists with a breadth of outlook that

would be unusual, if not unknown today, with open

and expansive philosophies but with critical and

focused practical outlooks. They were all philosophi-

cal omnivores rather than obligate parasites of a

single philosophy. None of the five displayed any

evidence of developing what Jacques Barzun

described as the gangrene of specialization apparent

in so much of western contemporaneous thought,

which so distressed him (Anonymous, 2012).

All five were engaged in the enterprise of growing

and expanding biological thought not only by factualaccretion, but also by fundamental research, review

and criticism of the very basis of biology. They

explored the nature of time and space and how these

relate to organisms, and how organisms interact with

time and space, intrinsically and extrinsically, and

they tried to frame a language which can begin to

address these concepts. Russell, especially, realized

latterly that biologists just have to accept the teleol-

ogy inherent in the organism, and adapt to that

reality, rather than succumb to mechanistic stric-

tures, sophistry and superstition. Ultimately, for

Russell and the other four, the world of life was a

world of connection among organisms, not just aworld of connections among materials.

To root the world views of the five to any single

source is of course a fruitless task. Their sources of

inspiration are as many as their readings and expe-

riences allowed. However, it does appear worthwhile

to ponder where their persistent contrariness issued

from, when compared with consensual contemporary

materialism. Recently, the contributions to science by

Goethes thoughts are receiving overdue and worthy

review; for example, see Wahl (2005) and Ebach

(2005). These works reflect on the relationships

between the observer and the observed, as ways of

seeing. But this is surely just part of the universe of

perception of the organism, as would have been rec-

ognized, I believe, by all five. In this regard, Russells

comments (1916: 4551) on Goethe require careful

consideration, especially the relations betweenGestalt, whole form, and Bildung, form change: a

world of being and a world of becoming, respectively.

Living organisms only exist in the world of becoming;

perhaps this is just another way of expressing Rus-

sells teleology of organism. Driesch too requires

further consideration (Driesch, 1908), partly as the

originator of the structured thought that the five

would shape their world views against. But Drieschs

views need also to be considered as a flawed attempt

to create a greater biology beyond the restraints of

materialism. Rdls (1930) chapter on Driesch and his

thought is both sympathetic and critical and worthy

of re-reading at the present time, especially if organ-isms are once again to be allowed to become central in

biological thought.

A slim volume by the theologian Thomas F.

Torrance (1969) might appear to be a strange place to

try to find support for the five and their efforts.

However, Torrance, citing the physicist Jean Chardon

and the chemist Michael Polanyi, points out that

biology will not make the advances that physics has

made if it remains stuck in mechanistic concepts and

language but that it must adopt a notion of a field

with its own characteristic structure to make use of

physicists space-time. What is needed is a transition

to the level of organismic thought.The five were all engaged in trying to go beyond the

mechanistic, to an organismic conception with, I

believe, some degree of success. Roll-Hansen (1984)

felt that the efforts of Russell and Woodger were a

failure. Perhaps rather than a failure, the first round

was just not yet successful, and the issue remaining is

just one of needing to try again, and harder. Russells

desire for a free biology, free of materialistic restraint,

was not just a result of the times (given as November

1943, in the preface to Russell, 1945) of his writing

about it, but Russell knew that freedom must be won.

The irony of a theologian, a chemist, and a physicist

supporting the direction of the efforts of the five,whereas the biological community largely fell silent

and remains so, is indeed poignant. What holds biolo-

gists back from trying again? Fear of ridicule, fear of

failure or just fear of fear? Has the seductive embrace

of the meta-narrative numbed our empiricism or has

the gangrene of specialization entered our collective

blood stream? Or have organisms become irrelevant

to modern biology and can evolutionary materialism

now answer all the questions that we are capable of

asking? If this is answered in the affirmative, then we

8 R. W. BRUCE



9/12

have reached the limits of our mental evolution. At a

time when physicists are willing to ponder the possi-

bility of multiple universes, to this writer, biology

appears happy to die by its own hand through mate-

rial strangulation.

I do not think it is necessary to erect another

abstraction such as holism to categorize the thinking

of the five; they all seemed to recognize, perhaps

intuitively, the place and nature of the organism in

biology. Ritter largely used ascidians to explore and

Figure 1. Willi Hennigs (1966: 31) scheme of hologenetic relationships. The original caption reads, somewhat crypti-

cally: Figure 6. The total structure of hologenetic relationships and the differences in form associated with its individual

parts. Note the diagram for an individual, bottom right. This shows successive stages (semaphoronts) in the life of an

organism as it undergoes metamorphosis (e.g. from fertilized egg until death), the successive semaphoronts being linked

by their ontogenetic relationships (ontogeny). Hennig (1966: 6) defined a semaphoront as the organism or the individual

at a particular point of time, or even better, during a certain, theoretically infinitely small, period of its life. The

individual organisms making up a species typically exhibit polymorphism, notably sexual dimorphism, and have

tokogenetic (nonhierarchical, reproductive) relationships. Division of the stream of tokogenetic relationships (Hennig,

1966: 58) leads to loss of reciprocal tokogeny between daughter lineages (streams) but establishes phylogenetic

(hierarchical, sister-group) relationships between species. From Phylogenetic Systematics. Copyright 1979 by the Board

of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with the permission of the University of Illinois Press.




10/12

expand his biological thought; Goldstein used his

brain-damaged patients; Arber used the growth and

form of plants; Russell saw the teleology inherent in

the organism; and Woodger reviewed and refined the

logic of the organism. Down very different byways of

nature, the five arrived at the same destination: an

appreciation of the unity of the organism and a bio-logical way of thought.

Despite largely having been written out of the con-

temporary biological narrative, the efforts of the five

have left and will continue to leave their marks in

many fields for those willing to look for them. For

example, Phylogenetic Systematics (Hennig, 1966)

remains one of the central texts of the last half

century in addressing and trying to resolve the

complex, confused, and contentious relationships

between natural classifications and evolutionary

theories. In some way or other, this book launched

many other texts and thousands of papers. It is worth

stressing that, in his work, Hennig laid great value onWoodgers efforts to develop and clarify the nature of

hierarchy and its internal logic and its relevance to

organisms, time and space (Hennig, 1966: chapter 1),

even though Knox (1998) has suggested that Hennig

misunderstood or misrepresented Woodgers logic of

hierarchy and its relevance to biological systematics

(see also Hull, 1988: 214).

Consider Hennigs well-known figure of hologenetic

relationships (Hennig, 1966: 31, fig. 6; reproduced

here as Fig. 1), an attempt to transform tokogenetic

relations into phylogenetic relations by way of specia-

tion. The underlying logic of this figure concerns

space, time, and organisms and their continuity,together with their interrelations; these were

Woodgers perpetual concerns and the substance of

his paradox. Recently, Rieppel (2010) has re-tilled

Woodgers hierarchies with respect to Hennigs inter-

pretations. This suggests that Woodgers presence

still remains clear and actual, even in current tax-

onomy, and the possible consequences of this are as

yet difficult to determine. The larger question, as to

whether hierarchy is a necessary and sufficient model

on which to base lifes reticulations as perceived for

example by Arber, still remains largely unvoiced.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Returning to Hennig, some comments in the foreword

to the 1979 reprint of Hennig (1966) are worth

recalling:

This reprinting of Phylogenetic Systematics has been initiated

through the action of the Fellows of the Linnean Society of

London a venerable organization whose members have

somehow managed repeatedly to penetrate the mists of their

own traditions, and maintain a sense of current and forth-

coming relevance in the science to which that society is

dedicated (Rosen, Nelson & Patterson, 1979: x)

In the spirit of forthcoming relevance, and indeed

with Woodgers prevision (see Biological Principles;

Woodger, 1929), the efforts of the five, and other

named and unnamed colleagues, require reappraisal,

and their results must again become part of the coreof biological principles founded on the concept of the

organism and its relationships with space and time. I

believe that the two meetings of the Linnean Society

that inspired this essay have already started this

necessary and long overdue reappraisal. A biology

that cannot find space for the efforts and insights of

Ritter, Goldstein, Arber, Russell, and Woodger would

not only be poor in body of fact, but such a science

would also demonstrate a failure of application of

disciplined and creative imagination. If, after all this,

we choose to remain trapped as underlings by the

metaphysics of materialism, so be it, although it is a

choice and as Cassius pointed out, the fault is not inour stars.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The many and various contributions of the Linnean

Society of London are duly recognized, not least in

maintaining a library that not only stores books, but

also forges conversations. Earlier drafts of the manu-

script were much improved during the editorial

process, and a later draft by the comments of three

anonymous referees and further editorial contribu-

tions. All remaining errors and misconceptions are of

course entirely my responsibility.

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