A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy 



century the vast majority of working biologists and biochemists have 

 been "mechanists." Their conception of the task of biology was 

 consistently that sketched out in T. H. Huxley's definition of physi- 

 ology in 1867: "Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions 

 or actions of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled 

 by certain forces and performing an amount of work which can be 

 expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object 

 of physiology is to deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand 

 and those of oecology on the other, from the laws of the molecular 

 forces of matter."^ This, however, though useful as a slogan, can 

 never have satisfied even the working biologists. It must always have 

 been obvious that the laws of chemistry do not appear until you are 

 dealing with entities sufficiently large to show the phenomena of 

 chemical combination, and similarly that the laws governing crystal 

 structure do not appear until crystals have been formed, and a fortiori 

 the laws of living organisms or social units cannot be studied except 

 at their own level. This is the problem which the emergent evolu- 

 tionists afterwards brought into prominence. If one were to know 

 all tliere is to know about the properties of atoms, for instance, it 

 may be said, one should be able to predict all the molecular com- 

 binations they would form, and all the living structures that could 

 be built up from them; but in order to know all about the atoms one 

 has to know a great deal about the molecules and the living cells 

 first. In 1838 K. F. Burdach had said "Physiology will always be able 

 to dispense with the aid of chemistry." This was not necessarily a 

 vitalist statement. During the succeeding century it became quite 

 clear that the regularities established in the biological sciences — 

 physiology, experimental morphology and embryology, genetics, 

 cytology, and the like — remained of durable validity, whatever 

 discoveries might be made in biochemistry and the organic chemistry 

 of substances of biological origin, to say nothing of biophysics. The 

 question became critical; how are the levels related? How do bio- 

 chemistry and biophysics contribute (as they obviously do) to a 

 unified picture of life and nature } For certain studies the problem 

 was a desperate one. When Wilhelmi Roux in the last two decades of 

 the nineteenth century founded the science of experimental mor- 

 phology ("Entwicklungsmechanik") by the strict application of 

 causal analysis to developmental processes instead of their mere 



^ T. H. Huxley, Science Gossip, 1867, p. 74, and in Lay Sermons; Addresses and 

 Reviews (London, 1887), p. 83. 



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