Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
13
The disappearance of function from
'self-organizing systems'
Evelyn Fox Keller
SUMMARY
The term “self-organization” is everywhere; the question is, what does it mean?
Immanuel Kant may have been the first to use it, and he used it to characterize
the unique properties of living organisms, and the term's subsequent history is
inextricably entwined with that of the history of biology. Only in the second
half of the twentieth century, however, does it begin to acquire the promise of
a physicalist understanding. This it does with two critical transformations in the
meaning of the term: first, with the advent of cybernetics and its dissolution of the
boundary between organisms and machines, and second, with the mathematical
triumphs of nonlinear dynamical systems theory and accompanying claims to
have dissolved the boundary between organisms and thunderstorms. But between
these two moves a crucial distinction survives, namely, between the emergence
and the organization of complexity. I argue that here, in this distinction, we find
the questions of function, purpose, and agency returning to haunt us.
For Kant (1790; 1993), the notion of self-organization was crucial to his efforts
to address the fundamental question of life sciences, namely, 'What is an organ-
ism?'. What is the special property, or feature, that distinguishes a living system
froma collection of inanimatematter? In fact, thiswas the question that first defined
Biology as a separate and distinctive science. And by its phrasing (i.e., implicit
in the root meaning of the word organism), it also specified at least the form of
what would count as an answer. For what led to the common grouping of plants
and animals in the first place - i.e., what makes 'the two genres of organized
