…and this is a 
It's sad to see that we've lost Brian Goodwin, one of the genuinely original (but not always right!) thinkers of our time. There aren't many left of the old structuralist tradition in biology, the kind of non-genetic purists who tried to analyze development in terms of the fundamental physical and chemical properties of the organism—they've been swallowed up and lost in a triumphal molecular biology research program.
Edge has a nice interview with and essay by Goodwin — they're good places to start. If that whets your appetite, you should also read his book, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots : The Evolution of Complexity(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is aimed at general audiences and is a good overview of why we should look at more than just genes to explain form.
He was an advocate for one view of nature, and I think he missed the mark by neglecting genes as much as he did; we know now that a lot of details of morphology are directly affected in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the genetics of the organism. But I think we can also make a case that the modern molecular biological approach is also missing a significant element. Every biologist ought to read a little Goodwin, just to leaven their picture of how biology works with his special perspective.
Life Science
Comments
Posted by: Kevin Z | July 17, 2009 11:45 PM
How the Leopard Changed its Spots was one of the first science I read when I discovered later in life that I loved science. I read that , Gleick's Chaos, The Lucifer Principle and The selfish gene all at about the same time. I decided to become a biologist after that. I spent 6 years working in cooking and music prior to that, during and after high school.
Posted by: toomanytribbles | July 18, 2009 12:32 AM
i woke up to a bunch of announcements of people... lost.
Posted by: Crazyharp81602 | July 18, 2009 12:48 AM
Including Walter Kronkite. He just died a few hours ago.... "And that's just the way it is."
Posted by: littlejohn | July 18, 2009 12:50 AM
I confess I don't remember Goodwin, despite my considerable age. But may he rest in peace. I probably read something by him as a child, but don't remember his name.
I know journalists are not your favorite people, but we lost someone today from my field. Let's all please refrain from saying anything bad about the late Walter Cronkite. He was one of the good guys. For those of you of a certain age, you may remember when he reported from the killing fields of Viet Nam that that war was lost. And his saying so made it end just a little sooner.
It has been a sad day.
Posted by: Crazyharp81602 | July 18, 2009 12:51 AM
Oops! Misspelled "Cronkite" with a "K". My bad.
Posted by: Will | July 18, 2009 1:42 AM
So it goes.
Posted by: Ken Wilber fan | July 18, 2009 3:11 AM
Brian Goodwin had an important but marginalized perspective on the philosophical implications of evolution and living organization. He also had a radical (at least around here) understanding of the nature of science itself:
He goes on (in the Edge interview) to discuss the merits of Goethe's science, as opposed to Bacon's, Galileo's, and Newton's. Theirs' is a science of abstraction, of quantities and equations--quite useful in their own right. Goethe's is a science of qualities and living processes. The results of evolution are understood from a Goethean perspective to be more an artistic expression of purposeful organisms than the mechanical selection of genetic information by an environment (which doesn't even acknowledge the life of the organism).
Goodwin continues:
What does it mean to recognize organisms as equivalent beings to yourself? Is Goodwin calling scientists toward an existential (or perhaps phenomenological) biology?
Posted by: tsig | July 18, 2009 4:49 AM
What is it with sciblogs that kills firefox
Posted by: Peter Ashby | July 18, 2009 6:23 AM
I read the Edge essay with a sense of missed opportunities. Goodwin uses his dismissal of the gene centred view to blind himself. For eg his comment on social insects and kin selection. It arises because it fosters the survival of genes. They recently proved that huge supercolonies of ants in different parts of the world are one organism by showing that individuals from European offshoots accept and communicate with individuals from the Americas but not from Asia. This is backed up with genetic analysis showing how genetically close they are. Similarly all the recent work on how smell is important in mate selection in humans and it is involved in selecting MHC genes that are different, but not too different. This is the basis of the built in inhibition against incest, your sister doesn't smell right because her MHC genes are too close to yours. Must maintain variation.
As to how you make form, the answer I'm afraid is by ad hoc mechanisms. You sculpt a limb in part through cell death, otherwise the upper limb stays trapped inside the body wall and the joints can't move. The difference between the foot of a duck and a chicken is that the cell death of the tissues between the digits did not happen in the lineage that led to ducks, leaving them adapted for wet areas.
You make wings, whether pterosaur, avian or mammalian but similar ad hoc changes, little novelty is required. Wing feathers are modified and elaborated body feathers. Fingers grow long and limbs never get free of the body wall and what results are membranous wings. From the failure of known and explicable genetic and subcellular pathways is how novelty grows. Deer arise because a mutation causes muscleless limbs to grow on their heads, they are without muscle because they grow on their heads, thus antlers. The whole seasonal, under hormonal control thing comes later.
I come from a sort of functionalist/structuralist background reading Hans Meinhardt, there are no gels, no Westerns, no blots, no sequences in my PhD (my fellow postdocs in my first postdoc did not believe such a thing was possible, I had to show it to them). I worked on the cellular effects of activity, electrical and mechanical, blocking them with specific blocking toxins and counting cells in developing limbs. But I realised there is a poverty to all this, it's like driving a car with no knowledge and appreciation of engines and the difference between disc and drum brakes and camshafts and pistons and how fuel injection and engine timing and mixtures matter and suspension. At the base of it all is genes, yes they interact with environment, both external to the organism and that it creates inside it as it develops, but without genes that environment is not alive.
Goodwin thus misses what is under his feet, he talks of holism, but then neglects a large part of the whole. It is good to have critics, it keeps people honest, but wilfully blind ones are not very much use, sadly.
Posted by: Didac | July 18, 2009 10:28 AM
Grasping complex systems is very tricky. The gene-centered approach has been (and still it is) an unavoidable phase in Developmental Biology. Identifying key genes and proteins has also an applicability (in genetic enginneering) that cannot be forgotten. Moreover, biophysical techniques are generally less standardized than biochemical techniques. Said that, it is evident that both approaches address the same phenomena. Changes in cell proteome and changes in cell morphology are closely related.
Posted by: oldtree | July 18, 2009 11:39 AM
Please PZ, don't link to the company that stole it's name from the large river in south America? Offering your support to a company that destroys the workplace for our country is not a real good idea. Consider recommending a legitimate book seller that doesn't encourage counterfeits and monopolize to end competition?
Investigate if you don't think it's the case, knowledge is after all, quite powerful.
Posted by: JG | July 18, 2009 2:22 PM
What do you think of the work from Pigliucci on reaction norm evolution? I have read some of his books and he tends to embrace a more complex view of evolution, being inspired by the concept of co-adapted gene complexes and often cites Wright as the origins of this view. I think the term he uses is the developmental reaction norm.
Posted by: Ricard Solé | July 19, 2009 7:19 PM
I had the luck of meeting Brian 20 years ago when he was a biology professor at the Open University. We became good friends and many years later we wrote a book together on complex systems (Signs of Life: how complexity pervades biology). I disagreed with Brian in many things, but his view of life and development as something beyond genes has become (in a way or another) adopted by most researchers today.
Brian was an extraordinary person in many ways. I enjoyed his company and his constant interrogation about the nature of nature. I was never convinced by some of his holistic views but he certainly helped me (and others) to find the path less traveled by.
Posted by: Ricard Solé | July 19, 2009 7:23 PM
I had the luck of meeting Brian 20 years ago when he was a biology professor at the Open University. We became good friends and many years later we wrote a book together on complex systems (Signs of Life: how complexity pervades biology). I disagreed with Brian in many things, but his view of life and development as something beyond genes has become (in a way or another) adopted by most researchers today.
Brian was an extraordinary person in many ways. I enjoyed his company and his constant interrogation about the nature of nature. I was never convinced by some of his holistic views but he certainly helped me (and others) to find the path less traveled by.
Posted by: Simon R. | July 19, 2009 11:38 PM
Frank McCourt seems to have snuffed it as well:
http://www.reuters.com/article/mediaNews/idUSN1945710420090719
I think this will result in a Kwokpocalypse.
Posted by: Roberto | August 17, 2009 12:23 PM
Pharyngula; do your homework. Dr Goodwin never neglected genes...gimme a break. He neglected neodarwinism excesses -his own words-as did s.j. gould and lowentin and many closeted ones. He didnt miss the mark, it remains to be seen. In any case he was a man, a scientist, an empriricist in that order. Compared to him, some are just juglars of science.
Posted by: Jerry R
|
October 15, 2009 4:56 PM
I agree with Roberto.
People misinterpret Goodwin and while I don't claim to be an expert on his motivations, I've read a few anecdotes that suggest that his extreme views were motivated to present the antithesis to the genocentric view. For example, Gould once said that he thought Goodwin was just being "mischievous" when speaking on disregarding the Darwinian philosophy and even Dawkins' suspected this of Goodwin when he stated, "I don't think there's much good evidence to support [his thesis], but it's important that somebody like Brian Goodwin is saying that kind of thing, because it provides the other extreme, and the truth probably lies somewhere between."
Given his extraordinary perceptions that are represented by the collective volume of his work, I think it'd be foolish to think he neglected the role genes (as ambiguous the term may be) in morphological evolution. He was a rigorous and concurrent thinker of evolutionary history and generative principles as represented by forms. He was an innovator with regards explicit examination of temporal organization as a driver of morphogenetic programs. He redefined what it means to be a biologist. The world lost a great, great scientist and philosopher.