A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy 



B. Zavadovsky, expounded this for an English symposium.^ An 

 equally good description was given by M. Shirokov: 



"A living organism is something that arose out of inorganic 

 matter. In it there is no 'vital force.' If we subject it to a purely 

 external analysis into its elements we shall find nothing except 

 physico-chemical processes. But this by no means denotes that 

 life amounts to a simple aggregate of these physico-chemical 

 elements. The particular physico-chemical processes are con- 

 nected in the organism by a new form of movement, and it is in 

 this that the quality of the living thing lies. The new in a living 

 organism, not being attributable to physics and chemistry, 

 arises as the result of the new synthesis, of the new connection 

 of physical and chemical movements. This synthetic process 

 whereby out of the old we proceed to the emergence of the 

 new was understood neither by the mechanists nor the vitalists. 

 . . . The task of each particular science is to study the unique 

 forms of movement characteristic of that particular level of the 

 development of matter."^ 



A few years later there was another good statement from a French 

 biologist, professor of zoology at the Sorbonne. Marcel Prenant 

 wrote : 



"In biology dialectical materialism is opposed both to vitalism 

 and to mechanical materialism, which are both really meta- 

 physical theories. He refuses to make a sharp distinction between 

 the physical and biological sciences, to reserve causal determinism 

 to the former and to appeal to teleology in the latter. But neither 

 does he suppose that biology must try to reduce itself to the 

 physical sciences. He affirms the unity of the world, in which 

 neither life nor human society constitute domains apart, but he 

 also affirms that this unity expresses itself in qualitatively differ- 

 ent forms of whose distinctive characters one should never lose 

 sight."3 



Dialectical materialism has been perhaps more successful in em- 

 phasising the existence of the levels of organisation and in showing 



^ B. Zavadovsky, essay in Science at the Cross-Roads (London, 193 1). 

 ^ From M. Shirokov & J. Lewis, Textbook of Marxist Philosophy (London, n.d.) 

 p. 341. 



' M. Prenant, Bull. Soc. Philomath. Paris, 1933, 116, 84. 



189 



