Antidote to an illusion

In the decade marking the centenary of Darwin’s death as well as the 150th anniversary of Goethe’s death, it is tempting to treat the work of Goethe and his cohorts as the rudimentary beginnings of a scientific discipline which would acquire its firm foundations some sixty years later in the work of Darwin... But such an ecumenical gesture would fail to appreciate the true significance of the movement initiated by Goethe, Treviranus and others. For the science of life they set out to found is not the one extolled in textbooks today. In truth, the works of Goethe and Darwin present us with two radically different conceptions of biological science, both capable in their own right of organizing the phenomena of life and serving as a basis for progressive empirical research (Lenoir 1987, p. 17). The field of morphology originated from Goethe’s conception of nature, where the term, coined by him, referred to the study of the internal laws guiding the formation of body plans and organ forms. As stressed by Lenoir (1987), the search for these “laws of form” turned out to be an questionable enterprise in Darwin’s view, where living matter, deprived of a “inner formative force” or Bildungstrieb, had to be shaped externally, as functional adaptations to environmental demands—the presumed creative force. Taking into account that this view has dominated the biological sciences for a century and a half, it might be thought that the present framework was established after a period of time in which alternative theories were refuted and finally laid to rest. However, a retrospective view to the issue reveals a different picture (Linde-Medina 2010). On the one hand, by switching from an internal to an external organizing agency, the Darwinian view treated the problem of form generation, which occupied a central role in biology at its birth, as a “black-box.” According to the theory of natural selection, the knowledge of the mechanisms underlying morphogenesis and pattern formation at early stages of development are irrelevant for understanding biological form, insofar as the production of new morphological variants is undirected, continuous