The Vision of a Deductive Meta-Biology: From Goodwin to Spinoza

This paper attempts to delineate a 20th century movement towards the formation of a truly 'deductive' metabiology. The aim is to reify and crystallize the historical reality of this new meta-biological ‘movement’ by suggesting that what essentially united it was an ontological or epistemically heuristic commitment to a biological vision whose grammar and syntax were provided by utilising non-classical forms of qualitative rather than quantitative mathematical modelling and expression. The paper primarily focusses on the anti-Darwinian metabiology of the Canadian born, yet UK domiciled, biologist Brian Goodwin, as well as comparing and contrasting his ideas withose those of other metabiological such as Per Alberch, Hal Waddington, Rene Thom and Vladimir Vernadsky. It is the contention of his paper that, historically, the purest expression and the philosophical consummation of many of the meta-biological ideas propounded by Goodwin and others discussed in this paper can actually be found in the extraordinary metaphysical vision of Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) particularly as expressed in his posthumously published masterpiece the Ethics (1677), and so this paper incorporates an account of the meta-biological relevance of Spinoza’s thinking in relation to these more modern metabiological thinkers, not in order to indicate direct influence, but as an attempt to reveal the potential metabiological inspiration of such an metaphysical hermeneutic for those concerned to increasingly understand the phenomenon of 'life' in deductive terms.