Theoretical Biology Club

= biology inspired by Chinese metaphysics

Contextual Quote

"The conferences on theoretical biology were not meant to establish a dogmatic position but to define a direction for further research in biology, bringing together the most promising developments in theoretical biology and related disciplines, revealing the problems that had to be addressed and the challenges that lay ahead. If there was a target to all this it was to overcome and replace the reductionist thinking associated with molecular biology and the synthetic theory of evolution that had reduced biology to chemistry and statistics, with evolution explained entirely in terms of variation and selection of genes. Waddington gave a place to advanced developments in mathematics and theoretical physics, and included the burgeoning new field of complexity science, best represented atthe conferences by Stuart Kauffman who later became a key figure in the development of complexity theory. Despite this, Waddington’s research program failed to define the direction of biology, even among those who appreciated the deficiencies in molecular biology and the synthetic theory of evolution. There were a number of reasons for this failure."

- Arran Gare [1]

Discussion

Arran Gare:

"In the early 1930s a group of outstanding biologists, inspired by the theoretical revolutions thathad taken place in physics, D’Arcy Thompson’s book On Growth and Form (published in 1917), and by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, formed the Theoretical Biology Club at Cambridge University from which they launched a major new research program, mathematico-physico-chemicalmorphology. They then attempted unsuccessfully to get the support of Cambridge University for this, and its participants dispersed (Abir-Am, 1987, 1-70). Unlike the research program of molecular biology which developed much later, this research program was never able to gain widespread support.

Waddington, along with Joseph Needham who later became a leading sinologist, was a leading figurein this movement, and despite the failure to get support from Cambridge University and then losing his position at Cambridge, continued developing the research program until the end of his life, providing an alternative to the research program of the molecular biologists and proponents of the synthetic theory of evolution with their reductionist agenda. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he organized four major international conferences on theoretical biology, involving most of the leading opponents of reductionist biology (dominated by molecular biology and the synthetic theory of evolution) in Anglophone countries. The proceedings of these conferences were published in four volumes as Towards a Theoretical Biology. These have been a major reference point for strong anti-reductionist theoretical biology ever since, but Waddington’s research program has seldom been embraced in its totality.

Central to Waddington’s research program were the concepts of chreod, homeorhesis and morphogenetic field. Waddington himself wrote that he first used the terms of chreod (originally spelt creode) and homeorhesis in Strategy of the Genes published in 1957, although he had presented the idea of homeorhesis in Introduction to Modern Genetics, published in 1939, without naming it(Waddington, 1968, 178). Early in his career he had noted the various changes in the development of the embryo involved switching between different possibilities and was affected by a great many genes.

The specificity resided within cells, and was characterized as a ‘masked evocator’. While to begin with, he thought this evocator had to lie in the switch, through the influence of Alfred North Whitehead’s characterization of ‘concrescence’ as a process of self-creation, Waddington recognized that this switching could be an internal property of such concrescence or self-causing self-formation related to but not determined by other acts of concrescence (Waddington, 1969, 81.). As Whitehead realized, his concept of concrescence broke with deep assumptions of Western thought, and was much closer to Indian or Chinese thought. As I will indicate later, through the influence of Chinese thought on Leibniz and the influence of Leibniz on Whitehead, it was actually influenced by Chinese thought, and ultimately, by Daoism. While used to characterize epigenesis – the differentiation of cells and generation of form in an organism’s development from embryos into adults, Waddington defined ‘chreod’ very generally.

In The Nature of Life, published in 1962 he wrote:

- There seems to be no generally recognized word to indicate a path of change which is determined by the initial conditions of a system and which once entered upon cannot be abandoned. I have suggested for this idea the word ‘creode’ from the two Greek words χρη necessity and άδος a path. We can say then that the hereditary materials with which an organism begins life define for it a branchings et of creodes. Different parts of the egg will move along one or other of these creodes, so that they will, after a long process of progressive changes, finish up as one or other of a number of different end-results, as it might be heart muscle, nerve, kidney and so on. ... A path of development, or creode, exhibit a balance between inflexibility (tendency to reach the normal end-result in spite of abnormal conditions) and flexibility (tendency to be modified in response to circumstances). I have used the word ‘canalization’ to refer to this limited responsiveness of a developing system (Waddington, 1962, 64).

Waddington characterized homeorhesis by contrasting it with homeostasis. In homeostasis a property such as temperature is kept constant through negative feedback. Homeorhesis is the capacity to maintain or buffer a chreod or path of development over time, so that if the system is made to deviate from this path of development or trajectory, it will return to the path further along.

For instance, if a large chunk is taken out of an embryo early in its development it can still develop into a normal adult organism. This buffering was visualized through Waddington’s concept and representation of epigenetic landscapes. Possible paths of development are represented by valleys, divided by ridges, which canalize streams. If a stream flowing down a valley is diverted, it will usually return to the centre of the valley further down. A very large diversion, however, might result in the stream flowing over a ridge into a different valley. The nature and degree of the buffering is represented by the steepness and height of the ridges and the difficulty the stream would have inflowing to a different valley.

While elaborated in the process of characterizing and comprehending developing organisms, Waddington argued these concepts could be applied more generally, suggesting they could be used to account for how the brain responds to stimuli (Waddington, 1969, 247), the development of cognition and language (Waddington, 2012, 288) and how cities (Waddington, 1972, 59-72),economies and societies develop (Waddington, 1977, chap.7). They were concepts designed not only to overcome reductionist materialism, but to overcome Cartesian dualism and the divisions between the natural and human sciences, the humanities and the arts by granting a place to experience inn ature and making thought, consciousness and society intelligible.

All these notions emerged out of the concept of morphogenetic field that Waddington had embraced early in his career as a biologist. As noted, this concept had been introduced by Driesch in1891, characterized as an harmonious, equipotential system, and was first explicitly characterized asfield first by Gurwitsch in 1912. The concept was developed in the 1920s and 30s by Hans Spemanna nd Paul Weiss, Ross Harrison, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy (the founder of general systems theory).The field concept, borrowed from the physics of Faraday and Maxwell, functioned first of all as an analogy with magnetitic fields and as an heuristic device to study and model mathematically how cells differentiate and organize into forms according to their position in the developing organism. However, it was sometimes accompanied by physical explanations of its role. Gurwitsch argued that these fields are immaterial, generated by interpenetrating electric fields produced by the constituent cells to corollate actions and the development of organisms (Haraway, 2004, 57f.). He had identified biophotons, specific types of photons produced by living material that influence division rates ingrowing organisms, and took these to be products of such fields and central to their organization.

Fields, he argued, unlike time, are not measurable and can only be described geometrically, not physically. Following Gurwitsch, theorists took morphogenetic fields to be electromagnetic fields, butin the 1920s they had little success in developing this idea (Bischof, 2000, 1-25). Other theorists postulated one or more potentially identifiable chemical substances distributed in space to define fields, with gradients functioning to orient cells, and by the late 1930s, this view came to dominate."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319248800_Chreods_homeorhesis_and_biofields_Finding_the_right_path_for_science_through_Daoism)

Reasons for Defending Waddington’s Research Program

Arran Gare:

"Why then support Waddington’s research project? One reason is that reductionist theories in science, even mainstream complexity theory, not only cannot account for experience; they render experience, including feeling, awareness, emotion, consciousness and the sense of being a subject of experience, unintelligible. At most, experience can be granted a place as an epiphenomenon, and this is merely an ad hoc acknowledgement of the obvious reality of experience. While it is possible that some people have evolved into things approaching automatons who can only operate mechanically and have no sense of being conscious (which appears to be the case with behaviourists and psychologists promoting a computational model of the ‘mind’), even these post-humans can be shown to experience pain and pleasure, and even these are incomprehensible from the perspective of mainstream science.

Secondly, what one finds among most reductionists is that, as with experience, a whole range of phenomena, including final causes, are surreptitiously assumed despite their inconsistency with their reductionist program, and many of these assumptions derive from the traditions of anti-reductionist thought exemplified and further advanced by Waddington.

Thirdly, Waddington’s ideas and those he influenced have been taken up, developed and proven to be fruitful, but for the most part in a fragmentary way that has prevented the achievements of this tradition from being properly acknowledged and integrated. However, the most important reason, I will argue, is that Waddington’s ideas were inspired by a radical tradition of thought, specifically, the work of Alfred North Whitehead, that had challenged the deep assumptions of modern science, assumptions that had given plausibility to Cartesian dualism and reductionist materialism. By virtue of having challenged and offered alternatives to these assumptions, this tradition could provide a far more coherent research tradition than mainstream science is capable of providing, even in its more radical forms as with complexity theory. This radical research tradition can incorporate what advances have been made by the molecular biologists and reductionist forms of complexity theory, while these approaches cannot account for the insights and achievements of the more radical anti-reductionists. And it is because of the failure to appreciate this with all its implications that advances in science challenging mainstream science, are dismissed or misrepresented, fragmented and then forgotten about. To begin with, however, I will examine claims that Waddington’s ideas could not be developed with sufficient rigour to justify his aspirations for them to become the dominant tradition in biological thought."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319248800_Chreods_homeorhesis_and_biofields_Finding_the_right_path_for_science_through_Daoism)

How Brian Goodwin furthered Waddington's work

Arran Gare:

" If there was one person among the participants of Waddington’s theoretical biology conferences who best represented Waddington’s own vision of the future for theoretical biology, it was his former student, Brian Goodwin. Goodwin maintained his commitment to the concept of morphogenetic fields, to explaining these through oscillatory patterns and to developing forms of mathematics adequate to such ideas. Like Prigogine, Goodwin was committed to comprehending all this through the concepts of thermodynamics. He went on to organize the conference referred to earlier on theoretical biology and to lead a group of radical theoretical biologists in Britain to challenge mainstream biology, relating this work to structuralism and participating in the burgeoning field of complexity studies. Goodwin contributed to advances in mathematics beyond catastrophe theory and became a major figure in the development of complexity theory, supporting Waddington’s concept of chreods by showing that development in organisms is ‘an intrinsically robust process’ in which ‘the dynamic organisation of the system resulting from the interactions for the constituent processes results in a morphogenetic sequence that does not require continuous fine tuning or parameters to guide the system to a particular state’ (Webster and Goodwin, 1996, 233). This was illustrated with the single celled organism, Acetabularia, as well as with multi-celled organisms. However, while having some influence, the group associated with Goodwin remained marginal. As Depew and Weber (1996,418) observed, he did not occupy positions in top universities, and ended up teaching at Schumacher College. And as noted, some of Waddington’s core ideas were simply dropped. Goodwin’s work shows that Waddington’s concepts can be rigorously defended and can guide further developments, but also why the more ambitious research program of Waddington has disintegrated and faded into the background.

Goodwin’s first major work, Temporal Organization in Cells: A Dynamic Theory of Cellular Control Processes (1963) used the mathematics of classical statistical thermodynamics to show how control of metabolism and epigenesis involving spatial differentiation and hierarchical ordering could be achieved by coupled biochemical oscillators. The role of coupled oscillators was taken much further than in reductionist forms of systems theory in that the organism itself was shown to identify and respond to resultant patterns, and deploy at specific times and places the conditions for such patterns to emerge, thereby advancing one of Waddington’s key conjectures - that oscillations served to coordinate activity within the organism. Goodwin also showed through this approach how different oscillations characterized by radically different process rates could both be insulated from each other and influence each other, thereby explaining hierarchical ordering. While using statistics to avoid the problem of dealing with nonlinear oscillators, the work was commended, despite these limitations, in a review by Robert Rosen (1965).Oscillations and rhythmic activity in achieving coordination was acknowledged, although not emphasised, in all Goodwin’s later work, work in which he fully embraced and developed the concept of field. One of his contributions to an anthology was titled ‘Developing Organisms as Self-Organizing Fields’ (1987). It is by developing the concept of field that Goodwin explained Waddington’s notion of chreods, that is, the capacity of a developing organism to respond to various perturbations so that at the end the result of development is perfectly normal. He pointed out that the kind of explanation for this offered by Wolpert, in which genes within cells interpret signals that specify their position in the field, their ‘positional information’, cannot account for pattern formations associated with the development of limbs. This requires holistic explanations in which constraints arise because elements are generated in groups which are constrained relative to each other. This process can be modelled by field equations. Thus a transformation from a five digit pattern to a four digit pattern of toes in frog’s foot does not involve the loss of an individual digit, ‘but a change in whole aspects of the pattern’(Goodwin, 1984, 113). Goodwin showed that ‘domains of distributed potential, which are the morphological fields of developing organisms, give rise to actualized patterns of localized structure, which is overt organismic morphology. ... Each organism carries within it the potential of creating a great variety of forms, for each morphogenetic field is described by equations with many solutions which define the set of morphological possibilities’ (1984, 118).In this scheme, what Waddington called a chreod becomes ‘a trajectory through the space of solutions of the morphogenetic field equations’. The high degree of stability through variations in temperature etc. is what ‘Waddington (1957) called genetic canalization’ (Goodwin, 1984, 118).Goodwin characterized a fertilized egg as a ‘developing organism insofar as it is a totality describable by a field,’ which cleaves to produce ‘complex parts such as neural plate, limb fields and eye fields’(1987, 176). In accordance with Waddington’s broader understanding of chreods, he showed that ‘once parameters were adjusted so that the intrinsic wavelengths of emergent patterns were smaller than the size of the initial regenerative domain that detailed structure could be generated, the system had a natural tendency to pass through a sequence of shape changes’ (Webster and Goodwin, 1996,233). He later described this process as self-stabilizing cascades of ‘symmetry-breaking bifurcations that have an intrinsically hierarchical property, finer spatial detail emerging within already established structures’ (Goodwin, 1994, 100). On this basis Goodwin claimed that ‘morphogenetic fields ... have a definition as precise as any field used in physics’ (1994, 88) and implicitly characterized chreods through them.

Goodwin developed another aspect of Waddington’s research program. In the epilogue to the conclusion of the fourth and last symposium on theoretical biology, Waddington commented on Howard Pattee’s contribution to the symposium in which Pattee had grappled with the question, How does a molecule become a message? Pattee concluded that a symbol can only function as a symbol when it is part of a system of symbols. Waddington suggested that the structures mediating global simplicity can profitably be compared with language and suggested that theorists of biology are just beginning to feel their way towards a language-metalanguage analogy so that the disjunction between genotype and phenotype will be seen as the analogue of symbol and symbolized. He argued that this requires a rethinking of what language is, arguing in opposition to most philosophers of language, including logical positivists and Chomsky, that the basic character of language is imperative, not indicative. It is meant to have an effect. As he concluded, ‘To a biologist, therefore, a language is a set of symbols, organized by some sort of generative grammar, which makes possible the conveyance of(more or less) precise commands for action to produce effects on the surrounding of the emitting and the recipient entities’ (Waddington, 2012, 288).Waddington was severely critical of philosophers of language for their preoccupation with statements, referring favourably to Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner who had argued that we are, first and foremost, practically engaged in the world, and should understand language in the context of such practical engagement. Utterances are first and foremost imperatives, and descriptions have a secondary status. Invoking Piaget and Bruner was not a random choice. Waddington had participated in an earlier conference on the life sciences in which both Piaget and Bruner participated (Koestler and Smithies, 1971). Piaget, who characterized his study of cognitive development as genetic epistemology, describing cognitive development as a process of assimilating inputs from the environment to cognitive structures and then accommodating these structures to better assimilate inputs from its environment, fully embraced Waddington’s work and characterized cognitive development as he himself had theorised it, as having its own chreods (Piaget, 1971, 18ff.).Waddington in turn praised Piaget and argued that his own work on genetic assimilation could be used to defend Piaget’s claims if it were ever shown that cognition and the ability to use language could develop in individuals in the absence of practical engagement in the world. This was later shown and used to dismiss Piaget’s work. Following Waddington again, Goodwin characterized organisms as cognitive and cooperative systems, drawing upon developments in linguistics to develop this characterization (Goodwin 1976,chap.7).

Goodwin and his colleague Gerry Webster aligned themselves with structuralism, a broad intellectual movement centred in France that was very fashionable at the time and later, and under the influence of Webster and Goodwin, was strongly promoted in biology by Atuhiro Sibutani (1989). While Sibutani aligned himself with the work of Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Chomsky, Goodwin, following Waddington, aligned himself with Piaget, starting his contribution to an anthology published in 1989 devoted to structuralist biology with the sentence, ‘Structuralism is based upon the proposition that actual phenomena are particular realisations from a defined set of possibilities’(1984, 49). Piaget’s notion of cognitive structures as self-regulating systems of transformations did have much in common with Waddington’s notion of fields as this concept had been defended and developed by Goodwin."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319248800_Chreods_homeorhesis_and_biofields_Finding_the_right_path_for_science_through_Daoism)

The Fragmented Advance of the Post-Mechanist Tradition

Arran Gare:

"The changes in direction of Goodwin’s work were followed by most, but not all of the radical biologists with whom Goodwin was aligned, some of whom had participated in Waddington’s symposia on theoretical biology. Despite these changes in direction and efforts to align their work with different research traditions rather than Waddington’s research program, Waddington’s ideas were advanced. Like Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman reaffirmed the bold quest for a reconception of life and its place in the cosmos present in Waddington’s symposia in his 2016 book Humanity in a Creative Universe. Although this was not defined in relation to Waddington, it largely reaffirmed the radical ambitions of the movement for mathematico-physico-chemical morphology, including giving a place to experience and consciousness (Kauffman, 2016). And there have been other developments in biology, uninfluenced by the theoretical biology movement, but consistent with it and capable of further supporting it. The problem is that because Waddington’s research program was marginalized, such ideas have not been properly integrated and fully developed. For anyone wishing to defend and revive Waddington’s vision it is necessary to recognize all such achievements and relate these to each other.

The work of Thom itself is important in this regard. Despite having distanced himself from Waddington, the trajectory of this thought and those who were influenced by Waddington’s ideas, and despite not acknowledging this, preferring to relate his ideas to Aristotle’s philosophy, Thom continued to advance Waddington’s concepts. This was also true of those influenced by Thom. For instance, a major work on morphogenesis taking Thom as a key reference point edited by Sarti, Montanari and Galofaro, Morphogenesis and Individuation (2015), is clearly dealing with a theme central to Waddington’s research project, but does not mention Waddington. The term ‘individuation’ is taken from the French theorist Gilbert Simondon. Along with morphogenesis, Thom became interested in signs and language and how they function, writing two books largely devoted to this(1983 & 1990). This work was the main inspiration for the biosemiotics of Marcello Barbieri which, granting a place to mechanistic explanations, challenged mainstream biosemiotics inspired mainly bythe work of C.S. Peirce and Jacob von Üexkull (Barbieri, 2003; Barbieri, 2008). It made no mention of Waddington’s conjectures. Biosemiotics inspired by Peirce and Jacob von Üexkull and led by Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi Kull, emerged as another radical tradition alongside not only mainstream biology, but also the tradition of theoretical biology inspired by Waddington and his colleagues (Favareau, 2008). These biosemioticians have also embraced the work of Gregory Bateson, which itself was inspired by the work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics, while partly under the influence of Whitehead, rejecting its mechanistic aspects (Hoffmeyer, 2008). Carrying on Wiener’s project, Bateson deployed cybernetics to anthropology as well as biology, redefining information non-mechanistically in the process as ‘a difference that makes a difference’ (1972, 453). This non-reductionist form of cybernetics was entirely commensurable with Waddington’s theoretical work. Links did develop between the biosemioticians and the theoretical biology movement, however. Howard Pattee’s work on how a molecule becomes a symbol was accompanied by a major contribution to conceptualizing hierarchical order. He argued that such order develops through new, enabling constraints. This means that there is no need to postulate a life-force and then a Cartesian mind over and above physical processes to account for life and mind. Their emergence can be accounted for as self-reproducing constraints. This idea was taken up vigorously in ecology by Tim Allen and then in theoretical biology by Stan Salthe, who pointed out that semiotics as it was being developed by biosemioticians could be understood through such constraints (Salthe, 1993). Pattee’s work was then embraced by the biosemioticians. And later, Hoffmeyer did examine and utilize Waddington’s ideas. However, they have remained separate research programs. While Barbieri has debated with these Peircian biosemioticians, the work of Piaget lauded by Waddington which could also be seen as a contribution to biosemiotics, has been ignored by both Barbieri and the Peircian biosemioticians, despite Peirce, von Üexkull and Piaget having emerged from a similar post-Kantian tradition of philosophy that emphasised the primacy of action over reflective thought in understanding cognition, signs and language.

The concepts that Piaget offered, by filling out the Peircian notion of ‘intepretant’, could bridge the divide between these biosemioticians, as I will suggest below. Many theoretical biologists allude to the role played by oscillations in generating and maintaining order in organisms. As previously noted, this was an important dimension of Waddington’s research program. However, even in the case of Goodwin, this was pushed into the background and was not a focus of his interest, although it was not forgotten. However, the importance of oscillations and their entrainment has been rediscovered in one specialist area of biology after another, revealing what Denis Nobel characterized as ‘the music of life’ (2006). Entrainment of oscillations was shown to be central to all forms of biological organization by Art Winfree, building on the work of Nobert Wiener who recognized such entrainment as the outcome of mutual feedback (Strogatz, 2003).

It is now recognized that smell is not based on spatial properties of molecules fitting receptors, but on resonance of oscillations (McFadden and Al-Khalili, 2014, chap.5). This is only a special case of such a relationship involving receptors. Candace Pert in her work on the role of chemicals involved in communication in the functioning of the body, in memory and emotion, also argued that resonance is central to the functioning of organisms. Her work was on the highly specific relation between lig and sand receptors. As with smell, these have usually been visualized as keys fitting into locks, but as Pert showed, their relationship is based on resonance of oscillations also. As she put it, ‘a more dynamic description of the process might be two voices – ligand and receptor, striking the same note and producing a vibration that rings a bell to open a doorway to the cell’ (2003, 24). This message can then change the cell dramatically. Ligands can be neurotransmitters, steroids or polypeptides, the most complex of the ligands. It is these that Pert showed were the molecules of memory, and interacted with the emotional state of the organism. As she summed up this relationship: The body is the unconscious mind! Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotion can be stored in a body part, thereafter affecting our ability to feel that part or even to move it. The new work suggests there are almost infinite pathways for the conscious mind to access – and modify – the unconscious mind and the body, and also provides an explanation for a number of phenomena that the emotional theorists have been considering (Pert, 141).Another advance in science that supports Waddington’s project, but which was developed quite independently of it, is ‘endophysics’ as developed by Otto Rössler, George Kampis and others, taking seriously that people, including scientists carrying out experiments and interpreting the results, are part of the world they are attempting to comprehend (Rössler, 1998; Kampis and Weibei, 1994). In Rössler’s work, the world is characterized as an interface between the subject and the rest of nature generated by a process of enfolding, a view that is consistent with and could be used to advance the work of those inspired by Whitehead and Peirce. There are other radical developments in theoretical biology associated with efforts to takeseriously the implications of field theory. Alexander Gurwitsch continued to develop his ideas, and his research program was never completely abandoned. In a book published in English in 1970, A.S. Presman demonstrated impressive results of research in the Soviet Union and elsewhere on the role of electromagnetic fields in biological processes (Bischof, 2000; Presman, 1970). Based in Russia withallies in Western Europe, particularly Germany, biologists inspired by Gurwitsch have continued to explore what role electromagnetic and other physical fields play in not only morphogenesis, but also the development of consciousness (Beloussov et.al., 2000; Popp and Beloussov, 2003; Tzambazakis,2015). This has been associated with a revival of interest in biophotons. Catcha and Poznanski (2014)defending biophoton field theory, argued that this can actually account for consciousness.

This research program has been taken up in USA by Beverly Rubik (2002; 2015), who has promoted the notion of the biofield as a bridge between the mind and the body. The proponents of photonic fields are not the only group arguing for the importance of physical fields in biology, however. Herms Romijn(2002) has tried to explain consciousness through virtual photons (a transient fluctuation that exhibits many of the characteristics of ordinary photons, but exist for a limited time in the interaction between charged particles). Romijn did not refer to the proponents of biophoton field theory, and they did not engage with his work. D. Lehmann (1992), a Swiss neurologist aligned with the research program of synergetics inspired by Hermann Haken, argued that electric fields are central to functioning of the brain and are responsible for its integration. It has been suggested more recently by the British biologist, Johnjo McFadden on the basis of experimental work that electromagnetic fields synchronize nerve firing, pulling together coherent ion channels in different parts of the brain, and this could playa role in the transition from being unconscious to being conscious (2006). If biophotons and weak electric or electromagnetic fields are central the organization of the body and to brain functioning, this indicates that, as Presman (1970) argued, integration associated with electromagnetic fields should be seen as communication rather than through an imposed force. If this argument is accepted, then such work could also be understood as a contribution to biosemiotics. There have been other attempts to explain consciousness through quantum fields, notably those of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff.

According to their theory, ‘consciousness arises from quantum vibrations in protein polymers called microtubules inside the brain’s neurons, vibrations which interfere, “collapse” and resonate across scale, control neuronal firings, generate consciousness, and connect ultimately to “deeper order” ripples in spacetime geometry. Consciousness is more like music than computation’ (Hameroff, n.d.). The theory is referred to as ‘orchestrated objective reduction’(Orch-OR) (Hameroff, Craddock and Tuszynksi, 2014; Hameroff, 2006). Its proponents have defended their conjectures with experimental evidence showing that if crucial areas of the brain where such reductions could occur are prevented from functioning, people lose consciousness (Craddoc, Hameroff, and Tuszynski, 2015), suggesting that these reductions are what is experienced as consciousness. Despite this, there has been considerable scepticism about the possibility of coherence over such scales.

This follows a severe critique of this claim by Max Tegmark (2002) arguing that it is impossible to maintain quantum coherence at body temperatures for the time required for such control of neuronal firings. Even by those promoting the importance of quantum coherence in explaining biological processes such as photosynthesis have accepted the validity of Tegmark’s critique (McFadden and Al-Khalili, 2014, 255ff.; Goodwin, 2007, 117).Alternative explanations of consciousness have been offered invoking different versions or interpretations of quantum theory. Much of this has been influenced by David Bohm, a major participant in Waddington’s theoretical biology conferences. His speculative ontology originated in the quest to make sense of quantum theory and overcome the opposition between quantum theory and relativity theory, but was also concerned to enable life and conscious experience to be comprehended.

Karl Pribram, and following him, Walter Freeman (1995 & 1999), working in neuroscience but influenced by Bohm, developed a holographic model of the brain and advanced the notion of the many-body field to explain its functioning. Paavo Pylkkänen (2007) has also defended Bohm’s theoretical work to explain consciousness, collaborating with him and his successor, Basil Hiley, in further develop this work. Henry Stapp (2009) has drawn on Whitehead to interpret what he claims is the Copenhagen version of quantum theory to explain consciousness. Beginning in the 1960s,the Japanese quantum field theorist Hiroomi Umezawa aligned with the Italian theorist Ricciardi developed a quantum model of the brain. This was associated with continued work on quantum field theory incorporating thermodynamics (1993). Their work was taken up and developed by Mari Jibuand Kunio Yasue (1995) to develop a general theory of quantum brain dynamics (QBD), work which has been further advanced by the Italian theoretical physicist Guiseppe Vitiello (2001) who developed a dissipative quantum model of the brain.

Gordon Globus (2003; 2009) has developed equally radical ideas drawing upon and aligning his work with these Japanese and Italian theorists, but also integrating it with the work of Pribram (Globus, Pribram and Vitiello, 2004). Globus’ work, which is also strongly influenced by Gestalt psychology, Martin Heidegger (who was strongly influenced by East Asian thought), process philosophy and post-phenomenology (including the work of Hubert Dreyfus),could be seen as aligned with efforts to naturalize phenomenology, work which could also support Waddington’s research program (Kauffman and Gare, 2015), although the leading proponents of this appear to have their own distinct agenda. Although there is a general sympathy for process philosophy, these diverse efforts are divided by lack of agreement on what is quantum theory and how it should be interpreted, and on what is consciousness, and often, ignorance of each other’s work. Finally, major advances in mathematics and complexity theory not only have provided means for further advancing Waddington’s research program, but for clarifying and supporting his understanding of mathematics while offering new forms of mathematics to better model evolution as Waddington understood it.

After having abandoned the quest to reduce mathematics to logic and set theory, Whitehead had characterized mathematics as the study of patterns and their transformations, and it was this view of mathematics that Waddington had assumed. With the development of chaos theory and complexity theory, including neural nets, phase space portraits, cellular automata the study of fractals, this way of understanding mathematics most clearly illuminated what the advance of this research involved. However, it was with the development of category theory that what Whitehead was striving to achieve became fully intelligible, and his project advanced. As Michael Heather and Nick Rossiter showed, Whitehead in Part IV of Process and Reality, laying new foundations for geometry, was building on his earlier developments of Hermann Grassman’s extension theory to represent connectivity in a physical world of process, in place of geometry formulated in terms of mathematical points. He had sketched a mereology (a theory of part-whole relations) but had not developed it (Heather and Rossiter, in press). His theory could enable mathematicians to bypass set theory, but this possibility was only fully realizable with the development of category theory. Developing category theory in this way, bypassing set theory with its limitations on reflexivity, also enables category theory to be formulated more simply and clearly and developed further. Complexity theory was developed further by Robert Rosen by utilizing category theory to model anticipatory systems that have models of themselves, in the process developing a general theory of modelling. This work illustrated the implications and potential of category theory. Modelling, Rosen argued, involves finding congruence between entailments, either in modelling different branches of mathematics, or in modelling physical or biological processes. This involves recognizing that modelling requires simplification, with the models being more precise but less rich in detail than what is modelled. Category theory, with its focus on representing operations, is ideal for representing causal entailments and also lends itself to being interpreted through Peirce’s characterization of mathematics as diagrammatical reasoning, along with Whiteheads characterization of mathematics as the study patterns and their transformations (Gare, 2015).

The Newtonian tradition of science, committed to a totally objective view of reality, is extremely weak in modelling entailments and incapable of modelling the entailments characteristic of living beings where it is necessary to pose questions of ‘Why?’ Living beings as anticipatory systems having models of themselves, must include these models in any model of them. An implication of this characterization of modelling is that it shows the impossibility of grasping the complexity of reality through an ultimate mathematical model. It to recognize irreducible multiple models in genuinely complex systems with terms defined impredicatively (generalizing over a totality to which the entity being defined belongs). This enables entailments to be situated in contexts, including the context of their observation. In such modelling, mathematics cannot be reduced to syntactical relations between symbols, as Hilbert aspired to characterize mathematics, but must involve reference to what is being modelled, and can acknowledge the observer (Rosen, 2000c).

Consequently, it is impossible to simulate the dynamics of such systems on a computer without using approximations. All this is consistent with and can be used to defend and further develop Whitehead’s understanding of mathematics, and justifies Waddington’s and Prigogine’s understanding of mathematics and its role in science as dealing with abstractions, as against Thom’s Pythagorean (or Cartesian) Platonism identifying existence with its mathematical models (Gare, 2016).These advances open the possibility of developing more adequate mathematical models by fully exploiting the potential of category theory.

Andrée Ehresmann and Jean-Paul Vanbremeersch in Memory Evolutive Systems (2007) have utilized category theory to develop an integrative dynamic model for self-organized multi-scale evolutionary systems, but unlike Rosen who attempted to represent living systems by a unique category, these authors have utilized a family of ‘configuration’ categories indexed to time. Quite apart from the promise this might have for representing chreods in the development of embryos and systems of similar complexity, they argue that this frees science from being dominated by the very limited notion of objects as physical objects located in space. ‘Objects’ should include ‘a musical tone, an odour or an internal feeling. The word phenomenon (used by Kant, 1790) or event (in the terminology of Whitehead, 1925) would perhaps be more appropriate ’they argued (2007, 21). An ‘object’ can be a body, property, event, process, conception, perception or sensation, and they attempted to take into account more or less temporary relations between such objects. In their models they ‘make use of fundamental constructions, to give an internal analysis of the structure of the dynamics of the system’ (2007, 33). Acknowledging the challenge this claim makes to traditional Western science, they wrote that ‘Long ago, the Daoists imagined the universe as dynamic web of relations, whose events constitute the nodes; each action of a living creature modifies its relations with its environment, and the consequences gradually propagate to the whole of the universe’ (2007, 21). Ehresmann and Plamen Simeonov (2012) have attempted to integrate Memory Evolutive Systems (MES) with Wandering Logic Intelligence (WLI), a ’practical framework for designing evolutionary communication architecture and their services and applications in terms of an ever growing model’ (2012, 105) as WLIMES to further advance theoretical biology.

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319248800_Chreods_homeorhesis_and_biofields_Finding_the_right_path_for_science_through_Daoism)