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ABSTRACT FORMALISM. “Like abstractionist art, molecular biology seeks to get past the apparent diversity of nature to reveal an underlying unity "more real than the real." Just as an abstract painter might represent a table by a line without concern as to whether the table is oak, plastic, metal, red, or white, so molecular biology has traditionally ignored species differences to discover the underlying unities of living organisms. https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

Fungi belong to a kingdom as strange as it is large, with enormous diversity of form and function. Dropped from Mars probably. View in LinkedIn

THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD. “Still there are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments, one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazment at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flows into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.” (Albert Einstein, and Burnt Norton). https://lnkd.in/dJ6fFGM View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENT PARADIGMS. “Embryologist Berrill, for instance writes repeatedly of "the amazing diversity of developmental performances" and "the complex reality" of embryonic development. Molecular biologists such as Monod claim that the elephant is constructed on the same principles and using the same materials as E. coli. The aesthetic of molecular biology is abstract formalism.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

Clockmaker’s shop in La Bisbal D’Emporda: dear clockmaker, do you know that time does not exist and that spacetime expands and contracts or even ceases to be altgether? View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on the merger of embryology and genetics. It is simplistic of me to suggest here that this is a case study of where science resists new ideas. Rather, the entire philosophy of the two disciplines was genuinely different, namely wholistic embryologists and reductionist geneticists, and this was at least a major part of the friction as the disciplines came closer together. View in LinkedIn

CELLULAR SEPARATION. “As Frank R. Lillie wrote in his critical review of 1927, "The germ exhibits the duality of nucleus and cytoplasm; the geneticist has taken the former for his field, the embryologist the latter." https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

CYTOPLASMIC SCIENCE. “Indeed, the concept of gene expression is absent in the major embryology books of the 1920s through the 1940s. Although experimental embryology had successfully separated itself from the earlier traditions of developmental anatomy, it remained a phenotypic science, and it identified itself as a science concerned with cytoplasmic changes.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

FIELDS NOT GENES. “The evidence gave coalesced into a concept called the morphogenetic field, and this morphological unit, rather than the gene, was seen as being the fundamental unit of development (and in the case of planaria, inheritance).” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

GOLDEN ERA. “But while the geneticists were making their great discoveries into the mechanism of hereditary transmission, the embryologists were also having their own golden era. Ignoring genetics altogether, embryologists embarked on the program which Joseph Needham (1936) christened "Gestaltungsgesetze, the rules of morphological order." https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn