The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2005
R. W. Gerard
Units and Concepts of Biology
Science, New Series, 125 (3245)
March 8, 1957, 429-433.
Index
In this conference, which is concerned with the
concepts and units of all science, my assignment is the sector of biology. The goal is thus set to consider the life
sciences in the context of all science - to compare and contrast, with
attention to both similarities and dissimilarities. An approach that is too general will lead into
the problems of philosophy; one that is too particular, to the separate subdisciplines. Attention to the sector boundaries, or
junctions, thus seems the most efficient, and I shall therefore emphasize the
boundaries between physical and biological science and between biological and
social science. Since the former boundary
has had far more attention than the latter, and since differences have been
noted more vividly than have similarities, my emphasis is on biosocial comparisons,
a topic that has occupied a portion of my effort in recent years [1, 2].
It is not chance that the cleavage between natural and
social science is greater than that between the sectors of natural science; it
is a cleavage between substance and action, body and soul, the objective and
the subjective. Inquiring man scans the
universe with his sensory end organs, orders and classifies the information
thus obtained, and so imposes a structure on the world he recognizes. Here is William James’ “blooming, buzzing
confusion”; here, in Henry Adams’ figure, is man “on a sensuous raft adrift in
a supersensuous sea”; and here is the impact of Kronecker’s dictum on mathematics, “God made the integers,
man did all the rest.” Some inhomogeneity must exist for man even to be, and emphatically
for him to divide his world into classes. And, since man depends mostly on visual
information (two-thirds of all the nerve fibers that enter the human central
nervous system come from the eyes), and since the eye detects primarily
patterns of spatial extension, man first sees his universe as a collection of
material objects. An entity is
distinguished from its ground and, given appropriate duration,
an individual is born to the perceiver. This
is the basic event.
The individuals that people man’s primitive world are
necessarily commensurate with his own dimensions, his sensory range, and his
time span; indeed, they even seem to conform to his status as a living being,
for they are strongly personified. As
technology offers instruments that reveal the lesser and the greater, as man’s
senses are extended (and mainly, again, his vision), new entities engage his
attention; but this is a later development [3].
More immediately, various observed
individuals are recognized as having some common attributes and so as being
amenable to grouping or classifying.
This is the taxonomic stage of knowledge, and it follows the stage of
simple observation and description just because differences are more likely to
command attention than are likenesses [4].
Man thus types his observed concrete
entities into sets and, as the second abstraction (the first being entity from
ground), draws sharp boundaries about them.
But, as Whitehead well said, “Nature doesn’t come as
clean as you can think it”; and, with growing sophistication, man replaces his plateaulike typology with the graded slopes of a
probability distribution in a population of nonidentical
individuals. A mere collection of
seemingly unrelated entities is first given meaning or pattern in terms of
perceived similarities; only later is it possible to look more closely at the
individuals and to reintroduce differences, but now ordered differences with
significance to the larger whole. Moreover,
once the initial integration (or induction) has been achieved, progressive
differentiations (and deductions) can be meaningful, and subclasses can be
conceived and identified, later to become graded sub-populations. This is a sign of growing familiarity with the
entities of attention, indicating more interest and ordering and leading to
subdivision of effort, or to fragmenting of science. Attention to a subject matter reveals finer
differences and new attributes, first of whole individuals and then of their
parts and structure, calls for new words to characterize these, and adds new
digits to a decimal number as subclasses and sub-subclasses become significant.
Here knowledge is in the morphologic
stage.
So far, we have considered primarily material entities
and their grouping on the basis of sensible, mainly visual, attributes. Clearly, animate and inanimate objects are
more alike than are objects and the behaviors of objects; so the physical and
life sciences, concerned (as a first approximation) with these two types of
object, are closer to each other than they are to social science, which is concerned
(still as an approximation) with the behavior of one variety of animate object.
But the real shift here is from a focus
on organization to a focus on action, from being to behaving, from form to
function, from pattern to process, from the timeless to the temporal. “Being” is the cross section of an entity in
time, and those aspects of the organization which appear relatively unchanged
in a series of such instants constitute the essential structure of the entity
or organism. Invariance in time helps to
identify the significant units of a mature system. Conversely, along a longitudinal section in
time appear the transient and reversible changes, often repetitive, that
constitute “behaving” or functioning, and the enduring and irreversible
changes, often progressive, that constitute “becoming” or developing. And with this shift in orientation to time
there occurs a shift in the entity of concern - from an object, a pattern of
matter in space, to a behavior, a pattern of events in time.
Let me briefly recapitulate. Man’s attention is first drawn to particular
objects in his experienced world. These
objects are grouped into classes and sub-divided into components, at first with
Procrustean rigidity and later with more freedom of variance, and then interest
shifts to particular processes. But, as
a group is more removed from concrete prehension than
are its component entities - a species seems more abstract to us than does an
individual organism - and as its component entities become more or less
interchangeable, so is a process more abstract and universal than are the
acting objects. Permeability, to some
thing - ion, gene, idea, person - and in some degree, is a property of all
boundaries (indeed, a boundary may be characterized as a zone of lowered permeability),
as irritability, quantified as a threshold to some environmental change, is a
property of all responsive systems.
The author is professor of
neurophysiology and a member of the Mental Health Research Institute,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This article is based on the second paper
presented at a symposium, “Fundamental units and concepts of science,” that was
held 27-28 Dec. 1956 during the New York meeting of the AAAS.
429
This shift in approach is like that from phenotype to genotype or that
from observation to model building.
For study of permeability or irritability, the
particular system examined is not initially so
important as is what is done with it, and the common denominator shifts from
the object to the variable. Some
attribute of the object is selected for attention and measurement as the object
is manipulated. New methods arise,
experiment dominates observation, and changes of the observable in time are
almost universally examined. Not the
nerve but the nerve impulse is the entity of concern, and this can be studied
on any particular nerve that comes conveniently to hand. True, important differences appear between
impulses in invertebrate and vertebrate nerves, in nerves of the frog and man,
and even in separate fibers of a single nerve; but these differences are mainly
quantitative ones in the same parameters. Indeed, the behavioral similarities are so
significant that eventually a functional criterion may help to define a
material set: a nerve cell is one that conducts an impulse, and a smooth muscle
cell is sometimes best distinguished from a connective tissue cell by its
ability to contract. This is the
essential shift from the morphologic to the physiologic mode. It must not be forgotten, however, that
manipulation remains limited to the material object: the influence of temperature
on conduction rate is determined by warming a nerve, not a nerve impulse; the
answer to the question, Did you ever see a dream
walking? is No.
The pure morphologist, then, is concerned with the
structure of particular objects and attempts to make his description ever more
complete. Here is the gross anatomist
and naturalist of the past as well as the old organic chemist describing a
substance or the visiting anthropologist describing a village. (The electron microscopist
or cytochemist or ethologist
of the present, as well as the modern macromolecule chemist or the factor
analyst seeking primary abilities or the sociometrist
noting contacts or quantifying opinion, is often busy with the specific case
but is usually concerned really with the class.) He observes what is; and he seeks ever more
powerful tools to identify a system and fix it at an instant of time, to reveal
its finer detail, to discriminate its more subtle differences, and to do this
more precisely on more limited samples. His
concern is primarily with the individual instance, like the clinician’s with
his patient, the humanistic historian’s with his character or period, the
artist’s with his poem or painting or other unique creation of man. When a class property becomes the focus of
interest, comparative studies replace those of the individual, and descriptive
morphology gives way to comparative morphology or systematics
or physiology or genetics or some other discipline concerned with relation or
function or development. As the class or
property replaces the individual - as the actuarial approach replaces the
clinical approach - there is greater distance between the operator and his
material, the material becomes more objectified - not Tabby, but a cat; not
John and Mary Smith, but a family - and analysis is added to description.
The entities or units which are significant, which are
invariable (organization) or repetitive (function) or progressive (development)
in time, similarly shift from concrete material entities to abstracted
properties of classes of material entities [5].
It is an interest in such
attributes as personality traits or social roles and connections as the units
of structure (aside from personal behavior and role-playing as actions), rather
than in the individual or groups that exhibit them, that makes some aspects of
social science seem different from life science.
An entity of interest, then, may be an object or some
property of it or a class of objects or some property of the class. But the class is, of course, a kind of individual;
and the more the members of the class interact - even to the extent of
developing into differentiated subclasses - rather than coexist, the more does
the superordinate group become a true individual
rather than a collection of ordinate individuals. The shift from separated cells to a
reproducing body, shown by the slime mold, remains an excellent example of such
individuation; a species with interbreeding individuals determining the
properties of its gene pool is a continuing superordinate
individual. This is the now widely
accepted relation of hierarchy and levels [6].
The atom, an individual or unit, is
built of subordinate differentiated and interacting units, the various nucleons
and other ultimate (for the moment) particles, and is built into a superordinate molecule. The individual molecule, in turn, with like or
unlike fellows, becomes a crystal or a colloid or some other material aggregate;
the colloids form particulates; these, cells; cells, tissues and organs; these,
organisms; and organisms, species and larger taxonomic categories, or, in
another way, groups, communities, and larger ecosystems. I have found the word org convenient
for those material systems or entities which are individuals at a given level
but are composed of subordinate units, lower level orgs, and which serve as
units in superordinate individuals, higher level orgs
[7]. The important levels are those
whose orgs (entities) are relatively enduring and self-contained. Thus, a cell is more likely to continue as an
individual maintained entity than is a given colloidal micelle or a cell
particulate, and an organism will vary less in time than will its parts or
organs.
In the course of cosmic evolution, assuming a start in
chaos, orgs at a given level become more highly integrated - with a clearer
boundary, with more differentiated and interdependent units, and so with a more
complex structure and more powerful regulating mechanisms - and new levels are
superposed. But each added level permits
the combination of old level orgs, now subunits of the new org, in various
ways. It is because of the explosive
increase in richness of pattern with rise in level that there appears to be an
emergence of unpredictable novelty. The
particular org that forms is indeed understandable in terms of the units, and
their relationships, of which it is built; in this sense the situation is reductionist. But
the particular org and its properties are rarely predictable a priori,
because of the great number of possible outcomes, with either known or unknown
probabilities and with that strong dependence on unspecified values of
unidentified conditions which we call chance.
Thus, higher level orgs are likely to have a greater
variety than lower order ones, and they are likely to depend more on their
particular past; they are more individual. But they are also less plentiful, since
several subordinate units contribute to each. A handful of ultimate particles form a hundred
species of atoms, or perhaps a thousand, noting isotopes, and a hundred kinds
of atoms form millions of molecular species. But the total of molecules is less than the
total of atoms, and the total number of members of an average species of molecule
is far less than of the average species of atom. The kinds of living organisms compoundable
from the subpopulations of atoms and molecules (and combined or macromolecules,
as nucleoproteins from amino acid and nucleotide building blocks) must be
infinite in any meaningful sense; and the groups compoundable from organisms
must be even more so. Yet the number of
members of each kind of organism is vastly less than of each kind of molecule;
and of groups, again less. In fact,
whether from insufficiency of material or of time, the actually realized
species or organisms are probably fewer than those of molecules (certainly they
will be with the creative meddling of synthetic chemists); and the realized
groups or ecosystems or societies, far less again.
430
Certainly all realizable molecules or cells or
organisms or groups have not been realized, and the null members are not
distributed at random. Particular
combinations, orgs, are more stable in a given environment than are others, and
these will be “successful” - that is, will occur in larger numbers - while that
environment lasts. Furthermore, individual
orgs form sets, as species form genera (and elements thus fit into columns of
the Mendeleev table); molecules divide as to
ionization or polymerization or what not into inorganic, organic, and macro
molecules; organisms classify into kingdoms and phyla and down, because of a
kind of periodicity in the patterns of formation. And, the grandest dichotomies
of all, the hierarchy of levels has branches. The physics of atoms is unitary. The chemistry of molecules is strained between
inorganic and organic and bio but still retains a unity.
At the next level, however, is an unquestioned split
into the complex inanimate orgs of geology and astronomy (and meteorology and
oceanography, perhaps even of architecture and engineering) and the complex
animate orgs of biology. Physics and
chemistry thus are subordinate to biology, the earth sciences coordinate with
it; and in many ways the earth sciences are more comparable to biology than are
the former. The entities of concern in
biology and the earth sciences, as compared with physics and chemistry, are
more individual and there are more species of them to deal with; and as unique
orgs at the supermolecular level they are closer to
ourselves, are more a subject (thou) than an object (it).
In the domain of biology between the cell and the multicellular individual, the tissue is an org with cell
units, and so also is an organ. The
first is a population, with cells related by origin or history, and a loose
org; the second is a tight well-integrated org, with cells related by function.
The same threads extend beyond the
individual - to species and larger population categories, based on descent, and
to ecogroups of various sizes and levels, based on
fundamental interrelation. Moreover,
above the level of the individual occurs another major branching, with
societies - especially but not exclusively of man, or even of any single
species - diverging from the population axis. Here population genetics and systematics leave ethology and
ecology, and here social science separates from biology. The ecosystem of a lake or forest, or of an
ant hill or flock of starlings, is thus coordinate with human spatial and
functional groups, the village or the tradesmen, as is the clone with the clan
as a lineage group. Again there is a
jump in individuality and a diminution in kinds, a greater nearness to man and a
consequent shift from object relationship toward subject relationship, at the
social level.
History, or becoming, I said in a preceding section,
is a regular change, normally progressive, in a system along the time axis; function,
or behaving, is a repetitive perturbation along this secular trend; and
structure, or being, is the instantaneous status. The units and subunits of an org are nodes of
stability, relatively constant in time. These
are the structural residues of past action, the molecules or organs or
institutions that have become fixed, yet which also carry the cumulative
changes of becoming. It is critical,
however, that, whatever role process initially played, traces of the past can
be carried forward only by concrete material entities, not by abstracted units [8]. The
neurone can evolve or develop by changes in its
components, and so the nerve impulse can also change, in speed, intensity, and
what not; but the impulse, per se, does not develop; it is a single action and
has no history. So also, the individual
person - or generations or groups of persons - carries the history of a
society, even though the role or status is the unit of interest. And, of course, the gene - or generations and arrays
of genes - carries the heredity of the organism and the population. It is well to note, to prevent confusion, that
secondary material products of the primary entities may also be carriers of the
information and ordering, the amount and kind of matter, which the past imposes
on the present - wooden vascular tubes, seed cases and egg albumen, chitin or
bony skeletons, elastic fibers and plasma antibodies, nests and burrows,
buildings and machines, books and recordings, are examples - but these separate
material carriers only reemphasize the point.
In the becoming of a given entity, there may be a
shift in emphasis from one carrier of the past to another, and the shift is
normally up the hierarchy levels. A
gene, if it is a nucleoprotein molecule, is the product of vast chemical
adventures, from the formation of atoms and simple molecules in the distant
past of its ancestral lineage, to relatively minor shifts in kind or arrangement
of atom or radical, the mutations of its macromolecular maturity. The cell is directed in its development, first
by the information stored in its genes, later by the structures and substances
that have been formed partly under their influence - reduplicating particulates,
somatic mutations, adaptive enzymes, and the like. The organism, in turn, develops by virtue of
the various cell types that are differentiated early in its individual
existence and their later patterning and other modification as tissues and
organs. And the group,
finally, changes as its component individuals learn differential roles
and skills. It is hardly surprising,
then, that higher level orgs are more individualized than lower level ones,
that they are more determined by their particular experience, and that they
carry a richer and more characterizing past. A society becomes what it is through learning
by its individuals, morphogenetic development by their cells, reduplication
with mutation by their genes, and so, by regress, into the domain of chemistry.
Attention was focused, in the preceding paragraph, on
the units as carriers of the past. Equally
essential in shaping each present from its immediate past is the environment
acting on the unit. Indeed, at each
stage of development of an org, the heredity is fixed in the units entering
that stage; and the environment, interacting with these units, leads to new
fixations - irreversible changes - in these units or in superordinate
ones. Thus, of course, arises the progressive specification and differentiation of
orgs, an amorphous totipotentiality yielding to a
concrete realization. And the
magnificent inventions of gene reduplication and recombination, of heredity and
sex, insure stability with variation; as the environment, operating through
mutation and selection, insures guided change. At other levels, the mechanisms of becoming
are less understood; but there is little doubt that they are similar in broad
principle, dissimilar in all else.
Since at each stage and level future development could
be along any one of a number of branching paths, depending on the vicissitudes
at the moments of decision, the difficult problem is not that of diversity but
that of uniformity. More than 40 cell
generations lie between human egg and baby, and at each division a slight
difference in cell properties or arrangement could magnify through subsequent
ones; yet billions of babies have been born within the fantastically narrow
range of “normality,” only a negligible scattering of monsters outside of it. Of course, too great an abnormality cannot continue
its development and is cut off by death; but, aside from such selection, there
are self-regulating or homeostatic mechanisms in operation at all times and
levels. If enzyme molecules are too
active, a fall in substrate concentration and an increase in end-products will
slow the reaction. If cells multiply overrapidly, they become too far removed from a source of
nourishment and are retarded. If a liver
is lagging in its many functions or a nerve trunk is failing to innervate its
peripheral field, the structures will grow or regenerate - controlled by still
unknown mechanisms -
431
until performance is adequate. Populations of predators and prey regulate
each other in quantitatively predictable ways. And if a man deviates far from the norm of his
culture, social pressures and sanctions - by better understood mechanisms than
the morphogenetic ones - bring him into line or exclude him. Homeostatic processes nudge orgs toward a
uniform state. The interaction of units
to form a superordinate org is regulated, as is their
action to maintain it.
This viewpoint has been little applied to the secular
changes of long-range becoming, but it is the daily bread of moment-to-moment
behaving. The vast bulk of the
functioning of any enduring system is as displacement-correcting responses. Here is the negative feedback of engineering
or the adaptive or self-regulating or homeostatic response of physiology. All orgs maintain themselves in a dynamic or
flux equilibrium by mobilizing internal reserves to oppose environmentally
imposed change; or, more rigorously, each unit responds to loads imposed on it
by its environment (which may be the superordinate
org of which it is part) with responses of its subordinate units that tend to
eliminate the stress on the whole, even at the expense of a greater temporary
displacement of the part. It is in the
particular mechanisms and sequences that different orgs, and especially
different level orgs, differ from one another; and each case must be examined
individually, as for its structure. Yet
here also important commonalities exist.
The organization of an org, its function-structure
complex, is investigated by imposing displacements on it. Ordinarily an input is presented, and the output
is observed, the stimulus-response situation. But the thruput in
the system can also be manipulated - as in plucking a piano string, stimulating
a neurone pool or cutting a nerve tract, or blocking
an artery or a highway - and the spread of, or adjustment to, the disturbance
tells much about the system. The quantitative
relation between magnitude of displacement and strength of restoring influence
- linear, concave, convex, sigmoid, or more complex - as also the existence of
different or like mechanisms for restoring displacements from opposite
directions, and whether the return is oscillating or damped, might serve to
group widely different orgs into classes. There is a limit of homeostatic tolerance, an
amount of displacement of a system beyond which it will not return. Change is then irreversible, and process
leaves behind it structure - behaving shifts to becoming and alters being, sometimes
leading to pathology and dissolution.
General questions can also be asked at this level
about the degree of displacement tolerated in relation to kind, repetition, frequency,
direction, and other aspects of the load; about the safety factor; about the
speed of change of physiological zero, or adaptation; and about many other
matters. Moreover, since structure is a
product of history, or irreversible process, the character of the material
change can serve as an index to properties of the action. A highly regular structure, as a honeycomb,
indicates a highly determined process, even though this is a behavior of a
group of organisms. Striated muscle
fibers are highly ordered longitudinally and more variable in section;
presumably the micelles are arranged very powerfully, once formed, but the
number in a fiber is determined more by chance.
An organism has organization, an ordering of material
in space and of events in time. Any
random arrangement is an order; the essence of ordering is that some particular
order, out of all possible ones, will be produced. The particular one can be defined in relation
to the observer, as near and far; or to some polarity he chooses, as large and
small; or to a functionally related object, as key to lock; or to a
generatively related object, as parent to offspring; or to an unrelated object,
as a photograph or model to the original.
Of these, the ability to reproduce itself, along with any fixed
aberration, is the most demanding and is especially characteristic of biology;
and life has been defined as “the repetitive production of ordered heterogeneity.”
The guiding information is carried, and
the given arrangement is imposed or reproduced by various means, from electric
fields around linked pyrimidines in nucleic acids
(four of which can “code” the building of the 20 amino acids of proteins),
through the protein antigens of cellular immunity, the metabolic and allied
gradients of morphogenesis, the engrams of racial or
individual experience, to the coded tapes of calculators and the culture
traits, especially language, of civilizations.
Communication of information across org boundaries,
between entities at the same or different levels, is not only the means of
fixing the past; it is also the means of responding to the present. Nerve impulses and hormones, like talk and
books, are transient or more enduring signals (or symbols). Perhaps hearing is more important than vision
to social man, as is often claimed, because speech is the vehicle for the
immediate communication of information in ongoing interacting behavior. Indeed, a major difference between physical,
biological, and social orgs may be in the relative importance for them of the
energy, substance, information, and meaning that cross their boundaries. The higher the level, the more do
individuality and specificity enter and the more is the system coded to, or
discriminating of, differential environmental stimuli or information.
The more also does the study of higher level orgs
involve the use of experimental methods and mental tools dealing with patterns
of relatedness. The forking paths of a
nerve impulse through a brain, or an infection in a population, or a rumor in a
community reveal connectivity patterns; and for the analysis of these relations
of “organized complexity” are coming to hand the new techniques of set, game, and
probability theory, of topology and stochastics, and
of other nascent branches of mathematics or logic.
History produces structure, and structure determines
function - becoming gives being, and this is capable of behaving; order is
produced and maintained - but the relations are so intimate and seemingly
reciprocal that the distinctions sometimes seem artificial. Further consideration shows that this is not
the case. For the
function of an org at its level depends on the structure of its subordinate units,
and the structure of these subordinate-level orgs depends, in turn, on the
history of their sub-subordinate units. Contraction of a muscle fiber is possible by
virtue of the fibrillar and membrane structures, and
these are produced by processes involving macromolecules, enzymes, and other
submicroscopic units. It would lead too
far afield to develop the notion, but it deserves thought, that history, structure, and function stand in
relation to one another as do cause, org, and purpose. In both triads, time runs, say, from left to
right through past, present, and future; and levels rise from left to right
through subordinate, ordinate, and superordinate. Incidentally, function (the noun), with an
overtone of duty, relates an ordinate unit to a super-ordinate org; at its own
level, functioning has an overtone of pleasure.
In the remaining space, I can merely suggest the
concrete application of these considerations. Again a brief recapitulation.
The units of man’s attention are first
concrete objects, directly sensible. These
are classified, then seen as populations with variance; dissected or combined,
to sub- and superordinate units forming hierarchical
levels; compared and analyzed so that functional units replace or add to
structural ones; and con-
432
sidered in relation to time, both as to irreversible
development and to maintenance or restoration of equilibrium; and in relation
to order and the information carriers that reproduce it. The world of organized experience thus plots
on a map, with orgs at different hierarchical levels - molecule, cell (or
crystal), organism, group, population (or society) - along the ordinate; and
with their properties - becoming, being, behaving - along the abscissa. The entities, the disciplines concerned with
them, the manipulative and rational methods for studying them, and the
resulting concepts about them, can be classified into appropriate squares of
such a table.
The hierarchy has two major branchings:
(i) above the molecule level, into more organized
entities with or without the collective properties that describe the living;
and (ii) above the organism level, into entities based on human or non-human
components. Biology is thus snperordinate to physics and chemistry and, at its lower
levels, coordinate to the earth sciences; it is subordinate to and, at its
higher levels, coordinate to the social sciences. The boundaries are reasonably sharp; yet the
biochemist or biophysicist or electron microscopist,
concerned with molecular traffic and macromolecular edifices, is much closer in
attitudes and operations to the physical scientist, while the systematist or population geneticist or ecologist, concerned
with organism traffic and population edifices, is much closer to the social
scientist, than these different-level biologists are to one another. And perhaps the biologists operating between
cell and organism levels are most akin to, say, meteorologists and might find
rich mental nutrition by learning how they handle such problems as storms by
the study of individual hurricanes, from Alice to Zelda.
The attributes that help define living orgs are (i) highly ordered and clearly bounded heterogeneity, spread
over many levels and with many differentiated units at each; (ii) dependable
mechanisms for reproducing units and patterns, by reduplication of the information
carriers, and for altering them, by recombination of carriers and by the
innovating (mutagenic, imprinting) and selective action of environment on the
carriers; (iii) powerful homeostatic mechanisms for maintaining and regaining
equilibrium, including especially the use of transported material, transmitted
activation by energy or signs or signals, and stationary
dominance-subordination gradients. The gene, materialized as a macromolecule, and the idea, materialized
as an engram, chiefly among the transmitters of
enduring order, are the bearers of structural and behavioral heredity;
they carry the past of the entity and account for its individuality. The hormone and the nerve impulse and the
sound or gesture, chiefly among the transmitters of transient order, are the
bearers of information and instruction to and from orgs or their subsystems and
evoke adaptive or innovative behavior that maintains the entity or modifies it
in conformity with environmental pressures.
The student of the living stands between the students
of the material and of the human on an ordinal scale. He deals with entities or orgs or systems that
are less when compared to the latter, but more when compared to the former;
more various and more individualized: more highly ordered and capable of more
varied behaviors; more dependent on a particularized past and a discriminated
present and so on fixed or transient information; more devoted to self-maintenance
and self-duplication over the short run - by stability, supplied by feedback
and inheritance - and more devoted to change and adaptation over the long run -
by modifiability, supplied by learning and gene shift and guided by environmental
selection; more sensitive to more environmental variables and more able to
dissociate the response from the stimulus in magnitude, kind, and time
interval; more personified and closer to the observer and harder to dimensionalize and quantify; more “free” to achieve their “purposes”
and reach their “values,” including survival and “progress,” and to be “aware”
of the attendant experience of inner “private” and outer public “reality” - if
these words add anything to what has been said.
Such an exercise in analysis and integration is more
than an exciting mental adventure; it can have important and useful
consequences. The attention of an
investigator may be directed to other disciplines from which ideas or skills or
information can be plucked ready to apply to his own. Social scientists have been slow in exploiting
biology in this way, but they could profit much from its approach and content. Acculturation as a stress, culture as a
self-regulated internal environment, institutions as organs, ideas as heritable
social mutations and subject to the same factors or pressures as operate for
organic evolution, ideologies as polar or balanced views of man as a whole
entity and man as a unit in a larger unity - such viewpoints can demonstrably
aid understanding of the social epiorganism or the
body politic.
The interrelations of subdisciplines
in an investigator’s own field may be exhibited, so that the great unities are
not lost in the small particulars. This
may spark the seminal insight that leads to a new structuring of the universe
of interest and, failing this, must reveal areas of research emptiness or
duplication. And this also should favor
presentation of biology as a dynamic whole, with a few penetrating concepts
replacing a legion of detailed facts and words, to our students and to our
public. Life science is a great entity,
and part of a greater one; biology, all science, will attract more and better
members and more generous and enthusiastic support when, in all senses, the
forest is added to the trees.
1. My thoughts on this topic have been much enriched by participation
in a symposium on “concepts of biology” that was sponsored by the Biology
Council of the National Research Council about a year ago (the symposium is
soon to appear as a monograph) and by the ongoing theory workshop discussions
with my colleagues at the Mental Health Research Institute, University of
Michigan.
2. R. W. Gerard, “The scope of science,” Sci.
Monthly 64, 496 (1947); “A biologist’s view of society,” Common Cause 3, 630 (1950) (reprinted
in Yearbook Soc. Advancement Gen. Systems Theory 1, 161 (1956)]; R. W.
Gerard and A. E. Emerson, “Extrapolation from the biological to the social,” Science
101, 582 (1945); R. w. Gerard, C. Kluckhohn, A. Rapoport, “Biological and cultural evolution,” Behavioral
Sci. 1, 6 (1956).
3. R. W. Gerard, “Instruments and man,” Instruments 18, No. 10
(1945).
4. ……………., “The organization of science,” Ann. Rev. Physiol. 14, 1 (1952); “From spirits to mechanism: two
centuries of biology,” in Facing the Future’s Risks, L. Bryson, Ed.
(Harper, New York, 1953), pp. 111-144.
5. Much confusion has arisen from the use of a given word as a noun, a
structural connotation, and as a verb, a functional one. Thus, function in physiology, adaptation
in systematics, and role in sociology, as
examples, when used as nouns, refer to an existing
state; as verbs, to an action. The
state, in each case, carries an implication of purpose and value, of the org at
one level to the superordinate system; and the
action, similarly, implies a behavior of the unit that has utility in the
larger setting. Adaptation of the individual,
in adaptive amplification, is different from the adaptation it has acquired to
an environmental situation; the adaptive radiating of a population is different
from the adaptive radiations of a phylum.
6. R. W. Gerard, “Levels of organization,” Main Currents in Modern
Thought, 12, No.5 (1956).
7. ……………., “Organism, society, and science,” Sci.
Monthly 50, 340, 403, 530 (1940).
8. ……………., “Experiments in microevolution,” Science 129, 727
(1954).
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The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2005