THE INTUITIVE WAY OF KNOWING – A Tribute to Brian Goodwin

As many readers will already know, Brian Goodwin was a visionary biologist, mathematician and philosopher who was professor of biology at the Open University, a founding fellow of Schumacher College where he taught holistic science, and a vice-president of the Network. This book consists of some personal recollections and a major interview with Stephan Harding, a section on evolutionary biology and philosophy, and another on theoretical biology. Among the recollections, pride of place goes to Stuart Kauffman, his friend and colleague from the Santa Fe Institute's work seeks to incorporate Darwin in a larger framework combining self-organisation with selection. Even those who disagreed with Brian, like Lewis Wolpert and Michael Ruse, write with respect for his contribution. And his colleague Claudio Stern gives a vivid account of Brian's laboratory at Sussex in the 1970s.

The three-part interview gives a great insight into Brian's background and the development of his ideas. He always felt at home in nature, camping lot as a boy, and his initial ambition was to become a forester to look after the great Canadian forests. However, he soon became fascinated by the nature of life, but his vision was widened by the poetry and turning music of his mother. He recalls a particular rock on which he used to lie down for what he called a mystical immersion. He then felt drawn to mathematics and physics because he felt that biology had no principles in the same sense. Another major encounter was Goethe, which influenced his development of the science of qualities and informed the methodology of his holistic science MSc. A further important influence was Whitehead with his emphasis on process. This helped him realise that the serious gaps in biology were 'the coherence, the organisation and the capacity for creative transformation in organisms.'

The second part begins with a paper by Brian himself 'Biology without Darwinian Spectacles' in which he analyses the limitations of the neo-Darwinist approach to problems with biological form. Darwinian spectacles are good for empirical details, but less so for perceiving deeper questions of order and organisation. He treats his central theme of form, transformation and order, postulating the need for a field theory in biology as in physics. He argues that genes may contribute to the internal selection of particular solutions, but do not actually generate form. As a card-carrying functionalist, Michael Ruse then provides a critique of Brian's view, and this is followed by a technical paper on epigenetics and generative dynamics by his former colleague Mae-Wan Ho, highlighting the centrality of developmental flexibility of organisms and fluidity of the genome in epigenetic theories. Many dualistic distinctions cannot in fact be upheld, such as those between interaction, variation and selection, and indeed between organism and environment, which means that there is no genuine separation between development and evolution 'as the organism actively participates in shaping its own development as well as the evolution of its ecological and social community. All this articulates a participatory worldview.

The next paper situates Brian historically in developmental biology, citing key figures like Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Hans Driesch and Conrad Waddington, as well as some of his successors. Margaret Boden contributes an essay connecting Goethe with Brian's structuralist biology.

The final part on theoretical biology opens with a brilliant essay by Fritjof Capra on complexity in life, outlining systems thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, processes and context, all of which has developed within complexity theory over the last 25 years. He explains the nature of nonlinear dynamics with its vocabulary of chaos, attractors, fractals and dissipative structures emerging at the same time. Indeed the concept of emergence itself has played an important role, and within this context, Capra argues that genes stabilise the emergence of biological form as a continuous unfolding. Philip Franses writes about the language of living processes within a holistic philosophy, while Johannes Jaeger and Nick Monk keep the gene in its place and conclude that Brian's most important contribution to sell and developmental biology is his insistence that explanations must be given in terms of generative processes. Here one sees the dynamic legacy of Goethe and Whitehead. Although the book is technical in parts, it provides an excellent overview of the significant contribution that Brian made to evolutionary biology and reminds the reader of his remarkable qualities as a man and a teacher.