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Re-forming Morphology: Two Attempts to Rehabilitate the Problem of Form in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

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Notes

  1. In case it is not apparent, the claims of this paragraph are intended to convey the view of those who discerned in the early twentieth century the seeds of a revolution in the sciences. They are not my own views.

  2. To be precise, Needham called morphology itself “the last stronghold of irrationalist views” in the natural sciences. The occasion was a memorial publication for D’Arcy Thompson: “[It] was precisely because D’Arcy Thompson considered morphology the last stronghold of irrationalist views that he devoted his life to the mathematization of it” (1951, p. 79).

  3. Older studies include Haraway (1976), Roll-Hansen (1984), Harrington (1996) and Allen (2004, 2005).

  4. An exception is embryology, which has received detailed treatments, for example, from Haraway (1976), Allen (2004), and Peterson (2011, 2014, 2017).

  5. Keller slightly overstates the point. The sixteenth chapter of Growth and Form leans heavily on the notion of mechanical fitness (i.e., the biomechanical efficiency of a structure for a task); hence, at least in this instance, some notion of function seems to be operative. See also Dresow (2017).

  6. More distantly related forms are a separate matter. These forms cannot be easily converted into one another by means of a geometrical transformation; in Gould’s words, they have to be treated as “‘primitive terms’ … as ‘givens’ to be acknowledged (and attributed to other kinds of causes)” (2002, p. 1199). Here history reenters morphology in an obtrusive way.

  7. Pouvreau and Drack’s outstanding article (2007) represents a watershed in our understanding of Bertalanffy’s biology. Perhaps their most important contribution was to highlight the depth of Bertalanffy’s debt to the neo-Kantian tradition, which had been neglected in earlier scholarship. This section is much indebted to their penetrating analysis.

  8. Pouvreau and Drack (2007) trace the history of these organismic principles through their various formulations.

  9. Equifinality is the ability of a system to achieve the same goal or end-state despite variation in initial conditions and/or pathways of attainment. Examples of equifinal behavior include the development of a “normal” adult organism from an intact, divided, or fused ovum, and the attainment of a definite size from different starting sizes, using different pathways of growth.

  10. For issues with Bertalanffy’s derivation, see Pouvreau and Drack (2007, pp. 319, 328–330).

  11. It is here, perhaps, that Bertalanffy’s debt to Thompson is most pronounced. Bertalanffy was an admirer of Thompson and seems to have taken from him a general sense that biology needs to be mathematized. But he also took over a very specific framing of the problem of form: that it amounts to a problem of relative growth. This was appealing since relative growth was tractable using currently available mathematical tools (like differential equations).

  12. Here is Thompson: “Except in certain minute organisms, whose form (like that of a drop of water) is due to the direct action of the molecular forces, we may look upon the form of an organism as a ‘function of growth,’ or a direct consequence of growth whose rate varies in its different directions” (Thompson 1917, p. 154).

  13. This assessment is complicated somewhat by the many meanings of the term mechanism: a topic that both Thompson and Bertalanffy discussed (e.g., Thompson 1918; Bertalanffy 1932). Still, there can be little doubt that the two men diverged in their general attitudes, to say nothing of their visceral reactions, towards the broad cluster of mechanistic ideas.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my gratitude to Marco Tamborini for inviting me to contribute to this special issue, and for his generous support and encouragement. I would also like to thank the participants in “On Growth and Form: A Centennial Perspective”—a workshop celebrating the 100th anniversary of On Growth and Form, held at Saint Andrews College. Two anonymous referees greatly enhanced the quality of this paper. Finally, thank you to my ‘lab mates’ at the University of Minnesota for helpful comments on an early draft of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, Heller Hall, 271 S 19th Ave #831, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Max Dresow

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Dresow, M. Re-forming Morphology: Two Attempts to Rehabilitate the Problem of Form in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. J Hist Biol 53, 231–248 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09603-8

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