Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Old and New Organicisms
- 2 Romantic Biology: Establishing Connections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3 The British Version: J. S. Haldane, D'Arcy Thompson and the Organism as a Whole
- 4 The New Generation: A Failed Organismal Revolution
- 5 The American Version: Chicago and Beyond
- 6 Romantic Biology from California's Shores: W. E. Ritter, C. M. Child and the Scripps Marine Association
- Conclusion: Whatever Happened to Organismal Biologies?
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Old and New Organicisms
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Old and New Organicisms
- 2 Romantic Biology: Establishing Connections in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3 The British Version: J. S. Haldane, D'Arcy Thompson and the Organism as a Whole
- 4 The New Generation: A Failed Organismal Revolution
- 5 The American Version: Chicago and Beyond
- 6 Romantic Biology from California's Shores: W. E. Ritter, C. M. Child and the Scripps Marine Association
- Conclusion: Whatever Happened to Organismal Biologies?
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
[T]he assumption that the orderly course of a process can be represented by an analysis of it into temporal and spatial processes must be dropped. It is thus the concept of wholeness which must be introduced as well as into the field of physics as into that of biology in order to enable us to understand and formulate the laws of nature.
Max PlanckLondon, 1931
In late June 1931 W. E. Ritter, professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Scripps Marine Association, arrived in London in order to chair the third session of the Second International Congress of the History of Science. The London meeting is mainly remembered as a gathering of radical scientists discussing how science could shape capitalism and how scientific rationality could revolutionize Western societies. However, the congress also included a small group of scientists with less ambitious goals: they aimed to rethink biological sciences on new theoretical bases. The title of Ritter's session was ‘Historical and Contemporary Relationships of Physical and Biological Science’, and participants included the physiologist J. S. Haldane, the zoologist E. S. Russell, the biochemist J. Needham, the engineer L. L. Whyte, the botanist B. Becking, the zoologist L. Hogben, the theoretical biologist J. H. Woodger, the zoologist D'Arcy W. Thompson and the physicist A. Yoffe. In general, as Ritter remarked in his critical summary of the papers, the discussion touched on diverse issues, including: the supposed difference between inorganic and organic natures; the possibility of a scientific synthesis of the whole of natural knowledge; the importance of Aristotle and his tradition for renewed life science; the importance of observation and experiment in the biosciences; and the new emerging physics exemplified by quantum theory, which, as Whyte put it, would transform ‘certain aspects of the traditional antithesis between physical and biological theory’.
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- Information
- Romantic Biology, 1890–1945 , pp. 13 - 32Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014