I found this book on Haraway’s faculty page publication list. I have been wanting to review the Michael Levin and embryology topics many times so this speaks to the same discourse from a similar angle as the one brewing in me in all the seminars and angsts and information explosion dream integrations.
Notes
- “fertile analogies in physics” - even with condensates in the 2010-now.
- Joseph Needham, both the morphogenesis and the Chinese history and philosophy of science (which is vitalist?)
- hunting of the phoenix (1931): reviews the debate between vitalist and mechanicist in biology. “archaei” or spirits as guiding the processes…
- developmental mechanics and embryology since early 20th century was about the questions of aesthetic organization, form, structure, function, becoming (process). eg polarity of body axis, symmetry, shape
- “But the splits of mind and body, structure and function, efficient and final cause were never sutured during the reign of corpuscular philosophy.” what? what’s corpuscular.
- “Man more than a Machine only served to emphasize the strength of the machine paradigm” — again in the AI age
- “the demonstration by Atwater and Rosa in 1897 that the law of conservation of energy applies strictly to animal metabolism” — animals are also living in physics
- “Natural selection was not unlike the invisible hand of Adam Smith. The free play of forces and the lack of internal constraints and organizing relations were central. The Enlightenment’s ideal of untrammeled reason, progress, and materialism was pervasive in the biological as well as in the social order of things.” — so mechanist == positivist?
- Alfred Whitehead, organic realism - i want to read his philosophy!
- metaphor is the driving force of communities (in science)
- organismic structuralism back propagates to piaget and levi strauss