Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ever since ancient times when living beings began to be studied,
heredity and embryogenesis have raised issues and incited uninter-
rupted debate during which many different concepts have clashed
with each other. In this chapter we shall set out the main terms of
this debate. We shall see that the way the problem of generation
has been repeatedly posed limits the possibilities of analysing it and
that consequently, biology is a prisoner of an Aristotelian concept
which prevents us grasping ontophylogenesis.
To achieve our end, we must enter the field of metabiology.
Indeed, any science is always based on an ontology. Independently
of any experiment, it supposes to be real prime entities making up
the world. The choice of these initial entities is fundamental because
they form the solid basis on which science can develop and condi-
tion all the theories that it is later possible to construct. To have
an in-depth understanding of the problems of biology that we have
mentioned and to be able to overcome them, it is necessary to
understand its ontological foundations. In fact, metabiological ques-
tions are implicit in all our developments and surface throughout
our analysis. We shall now try to tackle them head on.
The history of biology is tortuous. It is full of theories which
succeed each other mixing different points of view and progressively
evolving with a variety of nuances. We are not attempting here to
retrace the complete history of the theories of generation. That
would need a much more exhaustive study. However, it is possible
to pick out the origin in Antiquity of the problems that we have
encountered in this topic, in the confrontation between two extreme
theories which have since been taken up by numerous authors in
just as many variants, sometimes mixing elements of one with those
of the other. We shall start by describing the two principal con-
cepts, explaining their antagonistic relationship. The first was
expounded by Hippocrates of Cos (460-377 B.C.); it was then
refuted by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) who formulated the second.
The importance of the questions raised by these two thinkers and
the difficulty of resolving the debate that they initiated is shown
by the fact that after having survived in various forms, these ques-
tions resurfaced in the 18th and 19th centuries under the respective
