The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics

Whitehead was one of the sources of inspiration for the concept of organism as a third way between materialism and idealism (or vitalism), which was a central focus of the Theoretical Biology Club that flourished at Cambridge in the 1930s. For example, in Science and the Modern World, Whitehead wrote, with respect to seventeenth-century cosmology, that “[i]t involves a fundamental duality, with material on the one hand, and on the other hand mind. In between there lie the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality, interaction, order of nature, which collectively form the Achilles heel of the whole system” (57). In advancing his position, he wrote: “[A] further stage of provisional realism is required in which the scientific scheme is recast, and founded upon the ultimate concept of organism” (SMW 64). The fundamental ontological unit of his philosophy of organism is neither mind nor matter but rather the actual occasion, which is a rudimentary unit of sentience in a creative universe.Mechanistic materialism embodies the scientific attitude that all of reality, including living organisms, can be explained by physical matter operating in accordance with mechanical principles, whereas vitalism champions the idea of an animating force, élan vital or spirit, and protests the reductionism of organisms to mere automations (Peterson 4, 144). Vitalism, however, has the problem of empirical testing for many of its claims and the very obscurity of the concept (Peterson 160). The organicists sought a third way to the mechanism-vitalism dichotomy by focusing on what Whitehead said lies between, namely, the essential properties of life that for the organicists were most strikingly revealed in embryological research. An organism cannot be regarded merely as a mechanism even though mechanistic explanations serve a limited purpose in biology. Organisms are complex and “wet” mechanisms, yet they are not mere aggregates, and they exhibit characteristics, such as ontogeny and phylogeny, that must be explained by other foundational principles (Peterson 64, 67). Moreover, organicists “recognized the complex patterns of relationships exhibited within and between organisms” (Peterson 166). Holism thus became a dominant theme in the organicist view of life.According to Peterson's chronology, the first generation of organicists included E. Montgomery (1835–1911), J. S. Haldane (1860–1936), Hans Driesch (1867–1941), L. J. Henderson (1878–1942), E. S. Russell (1887–1954), C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936), and A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947). For this group of scientists and others who followed, philosophy and biology were inextricably linked in the quest for a theoretical biology or a Principia Biologæ, which aspired to a “resetting of the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of the field” (Peterson 63). The second wave included Joseph Needham (1900–1995), J. H. “Socrates” Woodger (1894–1981), Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972), and C. H. Waddington (1905–1975). Peterson observes that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the organicists of the early twentieth century was their exposure to history and philosophy that went hand in hand with their scientific training, whereas other scientists who came after tended to treat their ignorance of history and philosophy as a sort of scientific virtue (Peterson 241–242). According to this latter view of science education, history and philosophy were seen as either a hindrance or unnecessary to the advance of knowledge.Waddington, who commands the most attention in this book, believed that Whitehead's metaphysics provided a viable alternative against the orthodox view that speculation had no place in science (Waddington, Evolution 1, 10). The orthodox view, however, had failed to recognize that materialistic reductionism is a metaphysics, one that Waddington called “COWDUNG”—“conventional wisdom of the dominate group” (Peterson 228). This was his deliberately confrontational acronym for neo-Darwinism or the Modern Synthesis. Waddington explained Whitehead's influence on his scientific work in two essays, “The Practical Consequences of Metaphysical Beliefs on a Biologist's Work” (see Waddington, Evolution) and “Whitehead and Modern Science” (see Waddington, “Whitehead”). Another early unpublished essay in his career, “Philosophy and Biology,” is entirely based on Whitehead's metaphysics of events as the fundamental constituents of the world (see Waddington, “Philosophy”).Organicists such as Haldane believed that if at some point physics and biology were to be unified, it would not be biology that would be swallowed up in the synthesis (Peterson 31). Indeed, in the development of Whitehead's ideas on the issue, once process became the fundamental principle of reality, it looked as though biology was to become the more fundamental science. As Peterson notes, Whitehead thought that “physics itself was organic” (165).As mentioned above, Waddington was crucial to the project of the theoretical biologists for his role as one of the founding members of the group and for the development of epigenetics. His research question was: How could nonliving tissue instigate embryonic development? Or more broadly: What is the primary organizer? (Peterson 112). This set in motion research in experimental embryology for which he is best known and resulted in a theory of how the organism, genes, and the environment have respective roles to play in development and evolution (Peterson 123). The epigenetic path “canalized” to an end result shows how “the collective genome and the developing cellular matrix creates probabilities or potentialities of trait configurations that become phenotypes” (Peterson 125–126). Waddington absorbed the concept of canalization from Whitehead and called this process a “gene concrescence” (Peterson 137, 184; also see Waddington, Evolution 9–10). Against the gene-centric view of the Modern Synthesis, Waddington theorized that genes alone could not be the proper agents in specifying discrete traits (Peterson 133). Peterson summarizes Waddington's argument: We could assign genetic constituents for particular behaviors if we assumed environmental differences contributed little to the “development of the different genotypes,” but because we suppose that the environment has greater than “only negligible effects” on development, it must follow that the particulars of human culture and behavior are outside of direct genetic control and require a fairly large environmental contribution. (133)This concept is the root of epigenetics, which challenges the view that the “environmental context of one generation could not directly impact future generations” (Peterson 134). The environment can cause a genetic change as opposed to the neo-Darwinian explanation of random mutation (Peterson 135). It occurs when an environmentally buffered, new normal developmental pathway is established and the now favorable trait is produced even without the original environmental stimulus (Peterson 137). A “soft” inheritance, namely, a change in phenotype in one generation, then becomes “hard” inheritance as that characteristic is programmed into the genotype of succeeding generations. This is what Waddington called “genetic assimilation.”This invites a comparison with Whitehead's concept of prehension. As the actual occasion prehends the data of its past (the environment), it is canalized on its path to the creation of a superject (PR 129). Waddington obviously saw something in this metaphysical description of development that had a “definite and ascertainable influence” on both his theoretical framework and the experiments that he conducted in support of his theories (Waddington, Evolution 1). He was criticized by Francis Crick and Peter Medawar for smuggling metaphysics into science because of his focus on structural “buffering” of the system through feedbacks against disruption, genomically and environmentally, rather than viewing life as the operation of the unfolding sequences of preformed genetic instructions. Waddington was viewing development as a more complicated system of networks and interacting components that were not simply linear.As Peterson notes, Crick used his status as one of the founders of the DNA revolution in biology “to pontificate confidently on the relevance of molecular approaches to age-old problems” (206). Mechanism guaranteed scientific progress whereas vitalism and organicism were retrogressive. Waddington continually struggled against the orthodox view, and his scientific reputation waxed and waned over the course of his career. In an article published in 2011, Peterson argued that Waddington's explicit allegiance with Whitehead's metaphysics was one reason why Waddington's views did not have more impact on the Modern Synthesis (Peterson, “Excluded” 303). Waddington's response to his critics was that their reductionist view of life as “molecules and nothing but molecules” was far too restrictive and led to depersonalization and threats to human flourishing (Peterson 230; also Peterson, “Excluded” 317).Some of the crucial experiments in embryological research that led to epigenetics involved multiple species of amphibians, sea urchins, birds, and Drosophila. Experimental work by scientists, such as Hans Spemann and Hilde Mangold in Germany, led to the “Spemann Organizer,” which was the discovery of a specific region in the embryo that directs the development of organs and tissue in the entire body plan of the organism. Biochemistry alone does not answer the question of what is doing the organizing in the developing embryo. The “integrated system of chemical expression, rather than the chemicals themselves . . . seemed to be doing the ‘organizing’” (Peterson 94). The question of agency is addressed in Whitehead's metaphysics by what he calls the subjective aim of the actual occasion. In embryonic development, Waddington argued that it is not the genes that are the primary actors but rather the whole organism bringing together a very large number of genes into a unified type of action to form the different types of cells, tissue, and organs (Waddington, Evolution 9; “Whitehead” 144). The precise nature of the organizer, however, remains an open question.One of Peterson's most interesting arguments in The Life Organic is that the mechanism-vitalism-organism debate does not quite fit into any of the standard philosophies of science, e.g., Kuhn or Popper. Peterson wrote: “Instead of resolution or synthesis, revolution or replacement, the long history of organism presented here reveals recycling and co-existence—a messier, back-and-forth, almost pendular action. . . . Mechanism never successfully silences its opposition. Instead, mechanism and anti-mechanism perpetually dance around each other, a yin and yang” (11). Waddington's epigenetics, as empirical support for antimechanism, is an anomaly in Kuhn's sense of the word for the mechanistic paradigm, yet it simply remains a thorn in the side rather than a decisive refutation. Epigenetics is a challenge to the central dogma of the Modern Synthesis that the genotype maps to the phenotype in a one-way causation because it shows that organisms can alter their genes. Peterson, in summing up Waddington's legacy, wrote: “If he had bequeathed anything to the future, it was the hope of epigenetics, perhaps rooted in a ‘third way’ rejection of mechanism” (233).Peterson's The Organic Life is a fascinating history of the development of the theoretical biology of organicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its focus on a group of polymaths who defined the organic philosophy against the status quo is still very much alive today as theorists debate the extent to which the dominant biological paradigm of mechanism, as advanced in the Modern Synthesis, is sufficient to all biological explanation. If science is to be empirical, it cannot ignore the large body of evidence of what makes an organism an organism. Physiochemical, mechanistic descriptions do not tell the whole story. The only thing I think is missing from Peterson's account is the important role that panpsychism played in the theoretical constructions of both Whitehead and Waddington. Whitehead's Nature and Life and Waddington's The Nature of Life are works that invite rich comparisons for a view of nature as alive and purposeful.