Quote of the Week
(August 18, 2025)

The problem of form has long been central to biology, where each creature so notably reproduces after its own kind and according to its own form. “It is hardly too much to say,” wrote geneticist C. H. Waddington, “that the whole science of biology has its origin in the study of form.” In both their descriptive and theoretical activity, biologists "have been immersed in a lore of form and spatial configuration”

“Immersed in a lore of form” is, however, an oddly mild way of putting it. “Hopelessly adrift upon a fathomless sea of mystery” might be more fitting. An observer surveying the biological disciplines today (some seventy years after Waddington’s comment) can hardly help noticing that every organism’s stunning achievement of form has become an enigma so profound, and so threatening to the prevailing style of biological explanation, that few biologists dare to focus for long on the substance of the problem.

(from Chapter 10, “What Is the Problem of Form?”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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