Formal biology or biology of forms?: Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology. By Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1996. xiv + 287 pages. ISBN 0‐521‐35451‐X (hardcover).

Extract

It is about time to double our efforts towards a fully fledged evolutionary developmental biology, conceptually strong enough to condemn to oblivion that kind of schizophrenia which still pervades the literature on biological forms, with its excessive contrast between the Darwinian (or, rather, Neodarwinian) and the structuralist approach. All too rare are the efforts towards a dialogue, or even towards a little offensive introgression of foreign concept into one’s own favourite paradigm. The problem is still acute in this book.

While its title –Form and Transformation– might leave doubt as to the position defended in the text, the subtitle –Generative and Relational Principles in Biology– definitely places the work within the structuralist camp. That is what one would obviously expect, indeed, from the two well‐known authors.

What does generative mean exactly, for Webster and Goodwin? The term is strictly conceived in formal rather than historical terms. Time, size and even the physical nature of the objects are largely immaterial, which seems advantageous in terms of generality, but not quite so in terms of empirical applicability in the real world.