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LISTENING TO PLANT CHATTER. "Internal communications in plants share striking similarities with those in animals, new research reveals. With the help of tiny insects, scientists were able to tap into this communication system." https://lnkd.in/dNJuzzz View in LinkedIn

HOLISTIC CHAMPION. “Whitehead advocated a philosophy of nature that stressed the development, organization, and interdependence of all things.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

STUFF VERSUS FLUX. “The opposition between things and processes as the ultimate constituents of reality is of course an ancient one. The Greek dictum panta rhei (‘everything flows’) encapsulates the Heraclitean doctrine of universal flux.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend focuses on a truly fascinating and unusual essay by Professors John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, entitled ‘A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology’, or a viewpoint of process ontology, where life is a hierarchy of processes rather than of things. “There is no thing in biology (or, as Bohm would have it, in the world). Things are abstractions from an ever-changing reality. Reality consists of a hierarchy of intertwined processes. We remain strangely fixated on explanation in terms of static unchanging entities. Things are ‘precipitates’ of processes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

Passageway near Girona cathederal. View in LinkedIn

The first seven days of the zygote. View in LinkedIn

CONSEQUENTIAL SHIFT. “The move from substance ontology to process ontology has many interesting biological consequences. The various structures that an organism exhibits are not really fixed, but are instead continuously maintained by a large number of carefully regulated processes, which endow them with their relative stability.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

BEYOND DARWIN’S TANGLED BANK. “Ecological communities or consortia, such as biofilms, holobionts, and super-organisms, are not collections of relatively autonomous things but deeply entangled meshes of interdependent processes. This entanglement can make it extremely difficult to establish unequivocally the boundaries of a biological individual, or even to determine how many individuals we are dealing with in a particular situation. This is why ecological relations are best seen as an intertwining of processes.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

FAILURE OF REDUCTIONISM. “One of the key implications that Weiss drew from this is that a cell ‘can never be defined in terms of a static inventory of compounds, however detailed, but only in terms of their interactions’. What we perceive as an organism (e.g. a frog) at any given moment represents only a cross section, or time slice, in the unfolding of the persistent process it instantiates.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

A SECTION THROUGH SPACETIME. “Bertalanffy (1952) regarded the organism as ‘the expression of an everlasting, orderly process’ consisting of ‘a continuous stream of component materials’ that flow through it and at the same time constitute it. ‘What is described in morphology as organic form’, Bertalanffy argued, ‘is in reality a momentary cross-section through a spatio-temporal pattern’.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn