Year: 2022

GENETIC PARADIGM. “If you know the rules for the "genetic program," the development and evolution of the organism can be understood. In this way,"genetic program" becomes synonymous with mechanism of development.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

EMBRYOLOGICAL PARADIGM. “Embryologists, on the other hand, have a reputation for being holistic thinkers. Embryologists have historically stressed that "the organism in its totality is as essential to an explanation of its elements as an explanation of its elements are to an explanation of the organism" https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

EMBRYOLOGIST PAUL WEISS. “The true test of a reductionist system is whether or not an ordered unitary system...can, after decomposition into a disorderly pile of constituent parts, resurrect itself from the shambles by virtue solely of the properties inherent in the isolated pieces." https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

HOLIST VIEWPOINT. “He graphically illustrated this point by showing a photograph of an intact chick embryo, a chick embryo that had been blended through a homogenizer, and a chick embryo whose homogenized components had been centrifuged. The problem for reductionists, he maintained, was how to get that chicken back.” (Weiss). https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

CLASH OF PARADIGMS. “Pnina Abir-Am (1991) has shown the difficulties that Joseph Needham experienced in his attempt to try to reconcile the holistic embryology of the 1930s with reductionist chemistry. The chemists saw the constantly changing embryo as poor material from which they could isolate and characterize their enzymes.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y View in LinkedIn

THE CRUX OF THE SPLIT. “Embryology has a tradition of celebrating the complexity and diversity of life. Molecular biology has a tradition of celebrating life's underlying unity and simplicity.” https://lnkd.in/dQuxg6Y 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

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

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

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