Dev Genes Evol (2011) 221:255–279 The picture of the organism emerging from these reflections has astonishing similarity to Kant’s views outlined at the beginning of this essay. Although Kant speculated about evolution in his late writings, he had no mechanistic explanations for how the functional adaptations observed in the organic world could arise (Roth 2011a). Nevertheless, he assumed that the apparent goal-directedness or purposiveness of organisms is not in contradiction with the general laws of nature. Organisms just represent unique constellations of matter. From the perspective of general laws, their structure is extremely improbable, yet highly reproduc- ible. They are, according to Kant, examples of the lawfulness of the contingent (Roth 2011b). This implies that we have no alternative for studying organisms to the mechanistic approach, despite its insufficiency for a full understanding of their contingent features. Thus, Kant clearly realised that his ideal of mechanistic understanding implying mathematics is faced with significant, indeed seemingly insurmountable problems when applied to living nature. Acknowledgements Waddington’s letter to Turing was cited with kind permission of the Provost and Fellows, King’s College, Cambridge. I am grateful to Joachim Krug, Johannes Berg, Eric Davidson and two anonymous referees for insightful criticism and suggestions for improvement. I would like to thank Jeremy Lynch, Rebecca Richardson and John Chandler for critical reading of the manuscript, Shirine Jeradi for help with translating Prigogine and Wiame’s paper and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard for encouraging comments. I am grateful to Ute Deichmann for giving me the opportunity to present this topic at the third annual international workshop 2010 of the Jacques Loeb Centre in Beer Sheva. 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