Organization 457 



and mathematics in considering such diverse questions of botanical in- 

 terest as growth, surface-volume relations, size and form, phyllotaxy, cell 

 shape, least-surface configurations, growing points, spiral growth, and 

 the theory of transformations in biology. Perhaps his most important 

 contribution is what seems a very simple one: the demonstration that, 

 if a given organic form is inscribed in a series of rectangular coordinates, 

 endless modifications of it may be derived by deforming these coordi- 

 nates in various ways. This method is particularly useful in evolutionary 

 studies by showing the progressive changes by which a structure has been 

 modified. Its significance for development is also important in the 

 demonstration that change of form is not a localized and particulate 

 process but that a given form is an integrated pattern and changes as a 

 whole, so that alterations in one region affect many others. This method 

 of analysis somewhat resembles that of allometry in expressing relation- 

 ships mathematically. If allometry could be extended to three dimensions, 

 as Richards and Kavanagh suggest (1943), it could be used to make a 

 more precise statement of developmental relations than D'Arcy Thomp- 

 son has done. By these means the changes in a growing organic form may 

 be described graphically and expressed in mathematical terms, surely 

 an important advance; but they provide no clue as to what the proto- 

 plasmic basis of such a form may be. 



In this impasse we grope for clues wherever they may be found. The 

 science of cybernetics, for example, points to the resemblance between 

 the giant electronic calculators, with their "feedback" mechanisms, and 

 the nervous system, in which the brain is continually receiving reports 

 from the peripheral organs and sending back messages to them. There 

 well may be more than a curious resemblance between these complex 

 machines and a living organism, and in seeking to understand biological 

 organization we should not neglect the feedback principle. The fact 

 that there is no differentiated nervous system in plants need not mean 

 that this principle is not operative in them, for in plants the functions of 

 the nervous system seem to be performed by unspecialized protoplasm. 

 From other sources which at first seem very unlikely to offer any help 

 in this problem, clues may come. Information theory, with its systems of 

 coding, which has been found useful in so many fields, may not be without 

 significance for problems of development. In living stuff itself there may 

 perhaps be "coded," so to speak, a mass of data on which the developing 

 organism may draw and which may even be the basis of the morpho- 

 genetic norm that has here been discussed. 



Since organization exists at other levels than the living organism, sug- 

 gestions as to the mechanism for it there may come from simpler types of 

 systems. In Whitehead's philosophy, the concept of organism holds a 

 key position, from atoms to man. He has called physics the science which 



