Reiss, Michael;
Ruse, Michael;
(2023)
The new biology: A battle between mechanism and organicism.
HPS&ST Newsletter
, 2023
(MAY)
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Abstract
The Scientific Revolution, lasting from Copernicus to Newton, was above all a change in what linguists call ‘root metaphors’: from seeing the world as an organism – organicism – to seeing the world as a machine – mechanism. To use other language, science pre-Revolution demanded that one think of entities as functioning wholes, ‘holism.’ Science post-Revolution worked by looking at entities as composed of individual parts, ‘reductionism.’ The flies in the mechanistic ointment were living organisms. They seemed too intricately constructed for us to think that they could be the product of the blind laws we associate with machines. People worried about this problem from the time of Robert Boyle, in the seventeenth century, to Charles Darwin, in the nineteenth century, who claimed that through his mechanism of natural selection we can explain the nature of organisms using only blind laws. Not all were convinced and until the end of the nineteenth century there were many professional biologists as well as laypeople, who thought that a return to the old metaphor of the organism was necessary. In the first half of the twentieth century, thanks to advances 3 in the study of heredity, culminating in the discovery of the structure of the genetic material, DNA, in 1953, to many, mechanism was all triumphant. It turned out, however, that it was too soon to write obituaries for organicism. It is true that understanding the way in which DNA functions demanded one think in terms of its parts, reductionism; but, many phenomena, most particularly the growth and development of organisms, seemed still to demand a more integrated understanding, holism. Today there is a lively, often bitter, divide among biologists over this division.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The new biology: A battle between mechanism and organicism |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.hpsst.com/uploads/6/2/9/3/62931075/hps... |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10185014 |
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