03.04 Process Biology – Beyond Networks: The Evolution of Living Systems
Channel: Johannes Jaeger
Date: 26/04/2020

Module 3 of "Beyond Networks" explains what it means to take a process perspective on scientific inquiry, knowledge, and reality itself. In this lecture, we finally return to the actual topic of the lecture series: biology. I start the lecture wondering why the reductionist machine-mechanistic view of the world has survived in biology, while it was abandoned in physics about 100 years ago. I examine some of the consequences of its predominance in the life sciences, and argue that we will need a process perspective to move beyond machine metaphors, such as that of the regulatory circuit. I end this lecture with a brief introduction of some process philosophy in biology and some biologists with an explicitly process-based perspective.

"Everything Flows" (edited by Dan Nicholson and John Dupré) is an excellent introduction to process philosophy in biology (especially the first chapter, which provides an excellent introduction to the topic). You can download a free copy of the book by clicking on the "open access" banner here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/everything-flows-9780198779636. 

Dan Nicholson's work on mechanistic approaches and the machine conception of the organism is excellent. Check out his trilogy of papers published in "Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological & Biomedical Sciences" (2012, Vol. 43: 152; 2013, Vol. 44: 669; 2014, Vol. 48: 162). 

I also recommend "Every Thing Must Go" by James Ladyman and Don Ross, although it presents a slightly different vision of process philosophy than the one we will be pursuing in this course.

See lecture 03.04 for references to Whitehead. Susanne Langer's process-oriented philosophy of biology is described in her 1967 book "Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling." 

If you are a biologist, please do yourself a favour and read Waddington's "Strategy of the Genes." As clear, forceful, and to the point as it gets, and still as relevant today as it was in 1957.