10.28.07
Brian Goodwin on the ‘paradigm’
An Interview with Professor Brian Goodwin by Dr. David King. David King is a molecular biologist and editor of GenEthics News.
David King: What are your criticisms of the prevailing paradigms in biology, particularly Darwinism?
Brian Goodwin:
My main criticism of Darwinism is that it fails in its initial objective, which is to explain the origin of species. Now, let me explain exactly what I mean by that. I mean it fails to explain the emergence of organisms, the specific forms during evolution like algae and ferns and flowering plants, corals, starfish, crabs, fish, birds. That sort of spectrum of organism, each of which is distinct from the other. They don’t blend with each other, they are distinct from each other. Now the
problem is that in order to understand that the kind of distinct structure and form we have to understand how organisms are actually generated, and that means understanding how starting with an egg or a bud, the organism goes through a developmental process and ends up as a particular type of species with a particular morphology (shape and features). So the whole problem then is to try to understand the nature of that process. One of the fundamental issues is whether or not you can get more or less any kind of organism, or whether there are constraints. Darwin turned biology into a historical science, and in Darwinism, species are simply accidents of history, they don’t have any inherent nature. They are just ‘the way things happened to work out’ and there aren’t
any particular constraints that mean it couldn’t have all worked out very differently. An example is the structure of the arm and the wings of birds. There is always only bone at the top of the arm, never two, even though two would be very useful to birds, but it’s never evolved. So it looks like this is something that simply cannot happen because there is an intrinsic constraint on that process. Now there is plenty of evidence that that kind of constraint exists through the whole of biology. In other words, the reason why species are distinct is because you have only got certain types of forms, that can actually be generated by the developmental process. That really begins to shift the emphasis with respect to how we understand the different species and how they are related to each other.In order to get a really firm grip on this, we actually need a theory of the whole organism and its transformation. Organisms are organized wholes. That’s why they have these constraints. The sort of theory that you need to understand morphogenesis involves understanding the components which organisms are made. You certainly need to know a lot about molecules, but you have to understand how they are put together and what sort of dynamics is involved. Now this is where these new sciences that are called the sciences of complexity come into the picture, where you actually look at the dynamics of complex systems, and see how emergent order arises, in often very unexpected ways. This happens because of what we call the relational order, the relationship between the components. It doesn’t matter so much what the components are, what they are made of. The really important thing is the way they interact, and that is what determines the type of order that is going to emerge. Now what I and my colleagues are trying to do is to, in a sense, make a map between the pathways of morphogenesis that are available to species organized in a particular way, like algae or plants or amphibians, and to map that onto taxonomy (classification of species). In other words, it’s trying to make sense of what we see in evolution by having a theory of morphogenesis (development of shape and form), and making a map between morphogenesis and taxonomy. So it’s turning biology into a rational science rather than a historical science. There is no conflict. Everything that happens has a history, so in a sense all sciences have a historical component, but physics of course also has a very strong rational tradition. The whole point is to try to understand why certain structures are necessary, and this is exactly what we do in physics and the new biology. We are asking why has this particular structure emerged in the biological world and this makes biology much more like physics than the historical science that we got from Darwin.