EVERYTHING FLOWS

This significant volume is one of the main outcomes from a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council on process philosophy of biology. Process philosophy is associated with Alfred North Whitehead and more indirectly with his contemporary Henri Bergson - I read Whitehead's Process and Reality in Leipzig in 1983, having previously read his Science and the Modern World, a brilliant history of science. In fact, the editors of this book seek to distance themselves from Whitehead, mainly I think for philosophical reasons since Whitehead was a panpsychist and the authors argue for a naturalistic metaphysics, which leads them to remark that they do not want to associate themselves with 'undesirable philosophical baggage' - though it has to be said that everyone has to make basic philosophical assumptions, and that one person's philosophy is another person's baggage.

The volume is a major statement of process biology, covering metaphysics, organisms, development and evolution, and with the final section on implications and applications. Much of this is technical and aimed at biologists and philosophers of biology, but the general reader can gain a great deal from the introductory manifesto – I will concentrate on this, then Daniel Nicolson's essay on mechanism and organism, and finally on an interesting processual perspective on cancer. Going back to the Greeks, the archetypal representatives of process and substance are Heraclitus and Parmenides. Following Whitehead, there developed a school of organicists including Edward Stuart Russell and Joseph Henry Woodger; then, the later stage CH Waddington, who in turn had a great influence on Brian Goodwin, mentioned by Johannes Jaeger in his foreword. Waddington crops up in quite a number of papers. Other influences include the systems theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Paul Weiss.

The editors develop the case for a dynamic process approach, also drawing on quantum field theory and ecological interdependence. There are detailed critiques of essentialism, reductionism and mechanicism as natural correlates of substance thought, especially the last with its persistent influence within biology. Interestingly, they point out that the reason why mechanistic explanations provide insights is that 'the components of the mechanisms being described are sufficiently stable on the timescale of the phenomena under investigation' (p. 29). Mechanisms are in fact 'manifestations of specific patterns of stability of different processes unfold concurrently in living systems'. This process and implicitly relational view has implications for physiology, genetics, evolution and medicine. In their conclusion, the editors rightly observed that scientists 'are inevitably committed to certain metaphysical views, regardless of whether they are aware of them or not' (p. 38), as we have also noted in our Galileo Commission Report.

Dan Nicolson writes about re-conceptualising the organism – from complex machine to flowing stream. As far back as 1988, our May Dialogue was entitled 'From Mechanism to Organism' featuring Brian Goodwin and Richard Dawkins, who regards the gene as the basic biological component rather than the organism. One or two contributors take the view that organisms are metaphysically secondary to or abstract manifestations of the processes that constitute and sustain them. Dan goes back to the mechanisation of the Western worldview in the 17th century, noting that the machine metaphor has collapsed in physics but survives in biology as the machine conception of the organism (MCO). He argues that organisms are intrinsically purposive while machines are only extrinsically purposive; also that organisms are necessarily open systems exchanging energy and matter in order to maintain themselves in dynamic stability far from thermodynamic equilibrium, while machines exist in equilibrium or near-equilibrium conditions.

He then develops his process Stream of Life conception (SLC), drawing on historical precedents and articulating three ontological lessons from this approach: activity as a necessary condition for existence, persistence and identity grounded in continuous and dynamic self maintenance of form, and the proposition that order does not entail design – organisms and machines are both highly ordered, but only the machine is designed. When the case is put so clearly, it is hard to understand why one would cling on to a mechanistic approach to organisms.

The essay on a process perspective on cancer starts from the point that 'for a thing the default is persistence, for a process it is persistence that requires explanation - and in the case of the organism persistence 'requires an exquisite balance between cell division, cell differentiation, and cell death.' In the sense that cancer develops over time (the latency period), it is obviously a process operating at a cellular level, but the tumour is conventionally regarded as a thing. One implication of a process view is the influence of lifestyle over a period of time, and the concomitant implication that changes in lifestyle should be part of treatment and recovery. The authors characterise cancer as 'a progressive disorganisation of a variety of organisational levels', quoting Plankar et al to the effect that this is a 'global impairment of energy and information flow through the system' (p. 326). They highlight a possible role for disruption in morphogenetic fields as part of the pathological process, with disruption of the coherent dynamics at a specific level. This essay is an excellent example of how a process approach can contribute to clinical analysis.

I hope the book is widely read and discussed, as part of a necessary shift towards a dynamic process philosophy of biology.