A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy 



hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc., plus organising relations." This, 

 for biologists, at any rate, was one of the first clear statements of the 

 obiectivit}^ and importance of organising relations in the living system. 

 They had always been recognised, but at the same time obscured, 

 by the persistent opposition of progressive experimental science, 

 implacable but correct, towards every form of lingering animism, the 

 spiritus rector^ the nisus formativus, the archaeus, the ente/echia, etc., 

 etc. And the situation had not been improved by the adoption of the 

 organising relations by the neo-vitalists as the very citadel of the 

 anima itself. 



Organising relations, tlien, were to become the object of scientific 

 study, not the home of an inscrutable vital principle, nor the axiom 

 from which all biology must proceed. Since 1930 this point of view 

 has penetrated widely through scientific circles, all the more so as it 

 was really a description of what a large number of scientific workers 

 had previously believed in a somewhat unconscious way. If space 

 permitted, it would be interesting to consider the practical applications 

 of these ideas, the question, for instance, of what methods may be 

 adopted in the study of organised living structure. How far may 

 wholes be made transparent, as by X-ray analysis of the crystalline 

 and liquid crystalline arrangements which, as we now know, play 

 such an important part in the structure of the living body.^ How far 

 can living structure be so explored without interference with its 

 delicate organisation (cf. the principle of indeterminacy) } What are 

 the forces which hold morphological entities together, and how do 

 they link up with forces at the molecular and sub-molecular level .^ < 

 We cannot go into these questions at this time. Biological organisation 

 is not immune from scientific enquiry, it is not inscrutable, and it 

 cannot be "reduced" to physico-chemical organisation, because 

 nothing can ever be reduced to anything. As Samuel Butler once 

 remarked, "Nothing is ever merely anything." The laws of higher 

 organisation only operate there. 



For the emergent evolutionists, as is well known, emergence was 

 a logical as well as a historical category. Not only had the various 

 levels of complexity in the universe emerged in a historic sequence; 

 but each was logically unpredictable from the basis of those lower 

 than itself. Modem physical accounts of chemical events and chemical 

 accounts of biological events, however, have rendered this point of 

 view too simple. Chemical behaviour can be deduced from atomic 

 physics, and biological behaviour from biochemistry. But the essential 



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