Re: Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces
Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 8:21 pm
I guess one can rejoice that today biologists such as Levin are going beyond the old paradigm of biology, well described by Adams and Whicher in the 1950s in the book Ashvin shared, Plant Between Earth and Sun. But the most thought-provoking idea in this quote comes last.
Adams and Whicher wrote:Much that the biologist, who is imbued with the ideal of Goethe's theory of knowledge, strives for, can be realized through the clarity and precision of studies in morphology based on modern projective geometry.
Unhappily, the one-sided insistence on the use of analytical mathematics as a tool for biologists has had a profoundly formative effect on the biological sciences and on the minds even of younger scientists, some of whom, however, know instinctively that a purely materialistic approach to the secrets of life yields no real progress, and are at their wits' end to find a way out of the impasse. The prevailing idea is that the inmost structure of matter must somehow contain the key to the phenomena - or else, if it does not, the key is not to be found. The biologist, beholding the wonderful regularities of pattern in the forms of life, tends to assume that if a rational explanation is to be found it must be via the atomic, ultra-microscopic realm with which the physicist and chemist are dealing. He is thus driven into a realm which in the quality of its forms is only indirectly and remotely akin to the phenomena of life directly visible to his senses. A striving to perceive the phenomena of life through the whole, rather than through the part, receives no help from the ancient, Euclidean, finite geometry inherited from the past. This is why there is a tendency in biology to borrow basic ideas from physics, for though in general the old conception of space is adequate for the understanding of inorganic nature, it is so only to at certain limit today. It may be said that the atomic physicist allows himself greater ideal freedom than the biologist. This dependence upon physics has undoubtedly been a hindrance to the proper development of biology. It has even been said that while biology in its effort to be an exact science has taken the basis of its ideas from physics, in future the laws of physics would reveal themselves to be special cases of the more universal biological laws awaiting discovery in the future."