Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In other words, no external force, no divine architect, is responsible for the
organization of nature, only the internal dynamics of the being itself.
The beginnings of biology thus prescribed not only the subject and primary
question of the new science, but also its aim. To say what an organism is would
be to describe and delineate the particular character of the organization that
defined its inner purposiveness, that gave it a mind of its own, that enabled
it to organize itself. What is an organism? It is a bounded body capable not
only of self-regulation, self-steering, but also, and perhaps most important, of
self-formation and self-generation. An organism is a body which, by virtue of its
peculiar
and
particular organization, is made into a 'self' that, even though not
hermetically sealed (or perhaps because it is not hermetically sealed), achieves
autonomy and the capacity for self-generation. 'Strictly speaking,' Kant wrote,
'the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us'
(65, p. 557).
Admittedly, demarcating organisms in the real world was not always easy.
Should we think of ant or termite colonies as organisms? Beehives? Coral com-
munities? Humans too are social organisms - should the societies we form be
regarded as organisms in and of themselves? Are they also not 'self-organizing'?
And what about natural communities more generally? Is it useful to think of
them, as Frederic Clement proposed in 1916, as constituting a 'complex organ-
ism', governed by laws of development?
Yet even in the absence of explicit criteria for delineation, these two
terms - organism and self-organization - remained tightly linked and clearly
set apart from the realm of inanimate objects, especially from those objects,
machines, that were designed and built to serve human goals. Machines were
designed, and they were designed from without. Of course, organisms too were
still seen as designed, but in contrast to machines, biological design - or organi-
zation - was internally generated. The burden of the concept of self-organization
thus fell on the term
self
, for it was the self as source of the organization that
prevents an organism from ever being confused with a machine (see Keller,
2004, for further discussion).
The first major mutation in this tradition came in WW II. 'Out of the wicked-
ness of war', as Warren Weaver put it, emerged not only a new machine, but
also a new vision of a science of the inanimate: a science based on principles
of feedback and circular causality and aimed at the mechanical implementation
of exactly the kind of purposive 'organized complexity' so vividly exempli-
fied by biological organisms. In other words, a science that would repudiate
the very distinction between organism and machine on which the concept of
self-organization was predicated. Ross Ashby's contributions were crucial. In
the 1940s, he built a machine (the 'homeostat') that was to serve as a primitive
model for a brain. Ashby's homeostat showed that a properly designed machine
could exhibit autonomous, self-organizing, behavior. And this, together with his
