Emergence in Biology: From Organicism to Systems Biology

The nature of biology’s connection with the physical sciences and, relatedly, the status of biology as a science in its own right were common themes in the reflective writings of early twentieth-century biologists. One stimulus was the apparent success of mechanical explanation in the rapidly professionalizing biology of the later nineteenth century, notably in embryology, physiology, biochemistry, animal behaviour and – most famously – evolution. A great deal of early twentieth-century organism-centred biology in Germany and Austria, as well as in Germanophile British and American biology, continued a tradition of romantic holism tracing back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s appropriation of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Goethe, inventor of morphology, was particularly impressed with Kant’s definition of organisms as self-generating, self-organising wholes. The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s metaphysically rich interpretation of biological evolution, developed in L’Evolution Creatrice, had enormous appeal across professional biology, from the neo-Darwinian end through to the neo-Lamarckian end.