| The Third Culture |
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 Brian should be described as a theoretical biologist. He was introduced into biology from early days, but more recently he has had a structuralist perspective, reaching for fundamental patterns on some expression of life. In that sense, he has come in with a new message, into a biology that's more or less fixated on components and molecules. | Brian Goodwin "The 'new' biology is biology in the form of an exact science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order. Then everything in biology changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition, selfish genes, climbing peaks in fitness landscapes, what you get is evolution as a dance. It has no goal. As Stephen Jay Gould says, it has no purpose, no progress, no sense of direction. It's a dance through morphospace, the space of the forms of organisms."
BRIAN GOODWIN Brian Goodwin is a professor of biology at the
Schumacher College, Milton Keynes, and the author of Temporal Organization
in Cells and Analytical Physiology, How
The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, and (with
Gerry Webster) Form
and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology. Dr.
Goodwin is a member of the Board of Directors of the Sante Fe Institute. See EDGE:
A New Science of Qualities; The
Third Culture, Chapter 4. |