CRYSTALS, FABRICS, AND FIELDS Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology Donnajeanne Haraway New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1976 Copyright© 1976 by Donnajeannro Haraway. All rights reserved. This book may not bro reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewen for the public press), without written permission from the publishen. Library of Congress catalog card number: 75-rSr 74 International standard book number: o-3oo-or864~1 Designed by Susan McCrillis Kelsey and set in Baskerville type. Printed in the United States of America by The Murray Printing Co., Forge Village, Massachusetts. Published in Great Britain, Europe, and Africa by Yale Univenity Press, Ltd., London. Distributed in Latin America by Kaiman & Polon, Inc., New York City; in Australasia by Book & Film Services, Artarmon, N.S.W., Australia; in India by UBS Publishen' Distributon Pvt., Ltd., Delhi; in japan by John Weatherhill, Inc., Tokyo. To G. Evelyn Hutchinson for his inspiration and encouragement at every turn Contents Acknowledgments IX 1. Paradigm and Metaphor 2. The Elements of Organicism 3· Ross G. Harrison A Pioneer in the Construction of an Organismic Paradigm 64 The Silliman Lectures 94 4· Joseph Needham 101 A Great Amphibian 101 Mature Perspectives 138 5· Paul Weiss 147 From Fields to Molecular Ecology 147 The Living System 184 6. Conclusion: Of Paradigms and Scientists J88 References 207 Index 221 Acknowledgments Many persons have helped in the writing of this book. Their intellec­ tual, emotional, and material support is deeply appreciated. I wish especially to thank G. Evelyn Hutchinson, E. J. Boell, F. L. Holmes, R. S. Brumbaugh, Joseph Needham, Paul Weiss, C. H. Waddington, J. H. Woodger, June G. Goodfield, P. G. Werskey, Carolyn van Heukelcm, Richard Stith, and the Danforth Foundation. Two special friends are responsible for the warmth and space to work. They areJaye Miller and Helen Woods. I Paradigm and Metaphor To cast off the rotten rags of memory by inspiration, To cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion's covering, To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with imagination; To cast aside from poetry all that is not inspiration, That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of madness Cast on the inspired by the tame high finisher of paltry blots Indefinite or paltry rhymes, or paltry harmonies, ... Who pretend to poetry that they may destroy imagination By imitation of nature's images drawn from remembrance William Blake If the history of science were a disinterested, purely descriptive ac­ count of objective operations performed to elucidate the workings of a nature no one believed in anymore, it would raise few passions. Similarly, if science were progressive in the sense of an ever enlarging body of true statements about an ever unchanging yet fundamentally inaccessible world, nature would be seen simply as a big puzzle to be solved. Surely there would be no fundamental insights into personal or historical experience to be expected from pursuing such a science. Simple cumulative science would be a curse. Those with leisure, money, and arbitrary reason to solve puzzles could devote their time to it. They could then present solutions to society, which would translate them into technology in the interests of current power alignments, benign or otherwise. History would be the search into the past for the truly clever who anticipated the later, better solutions to problems. But at the same time, the hope of approaching nearer and nearer to nature is not surrendered lightly in science. Nor should it be. If the views of science espoused both by the old realists and by the more recent positivists are to be rejected, it remains for us to understand in what sense science is progressive and in what way it might lead to an 2 CRYSTALS, FABRICS, AND FIELDS appreciation of the structure of nature. It seems that the task of con­ temporary history and philosophy of science is to rediscover for this age a humane sense of scientific research and theory. For it is a fact that the history of science does raise passions, and the basic perspective adopted toward the status of scientific worlds does condition our poetry and our politics. Surely much of our dis-ease with modern science comes from appreciation of the inadequacy of the old view of progressive, control-oriented, objective descriptions of nature (or of meter readings, if nature herself is hiding or dead). Two fundamental problems in understanding science can be noted: How does science change and what are the implications of the view adopted for the theoretical corpus of a science? Second, in what way can a science lead to a sense of the natural? To approach these two very broad issues, it is useful to look at a quite restricted area of one science, developmental biology, in the first half of the twentieth century. The period is a time of basic crisis in which the age-old dichotomy between mechanism and vitalism was reworked and a fruitful synthetic organicism emerged, with far-reaching implications for experimental programs and for our understanding of the structure of organisms. As a key aid in analyzing a period of change in a science, it is instructive to explore the notion of a paradigm as applied to biology. The book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (I g62), is of central importance in exploring a change in a biological paradigm. An important aspect of a paradigm is metaphor, and it is suggestive to investigate the use of metaphor to direct research and its interpretation. The paradigm concept is rich with suggestions for analyzing the proper place of metaphor in biology. To begin to under­ stand again the place of image in a science should suggest a way in which natural structure can be seen in a post-positivist age. 1 Visual imagery in particular is of critical importance. 1. Kuhn himself does not believe that science "draws constantly nearer to some goal ~t by nature in advance." The progressive aspect of science is different for him. "Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from [emphasis add~) the commu· nity's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper m.-asurr of scientific achirvt"ment is thr extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?" ( 1!)62, p. 170). Thr view to be drvrloprd below is different from Kuhn's but it is through his discus.•ion of paradigm and paradigm com· munities that this study will approach the problem of natural structurrs. This essay will not be ablr to discuss adequately many important is.•ues raised by Kuhn. For a relevant critiqur srr Kordig 197 I. PARADIGM AND METAPHOR 3 Kuhn raises a host of interesting problems when he introduces the notion of paradigm change. Normal science, he claims, proceeds by exploring the suggestions derived from a dominant paradigm. The paradigm is not a set of explicit rules of procedure but rather "an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions" (p. 23). Kuhn simply takes a device common to writers of history, the period, and applies it to a field thought to have developed differently from the rest of human endeavor, that is, in a straight line with occasional Dark Ages and metaphysical sidetracks. But his deeper value lies in refining two aspects of scientific paradigm: paradigm as shared constellation of belief (or disciplinary matrix) and paradigm as model or example. Both the communal and the exemplar nature of paradigms are essential to understanding fundamental change in a science. The first aspect leads to a consideration of particular communities in science, their formation and modes of communication, and their types of interaction with conflicting scientific communities using different images and thus different languages. Kuhn's book has been criticized as leading to a highly subjective view of science in which an undefinable central picture conditioned all activity and prevented the believer from talking with any hut the converted (Lakatos and Musgrave 1970). Thus the paradigm could be shown but not rigorously defined. The distinction is not far from that made by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus between saying and showing. Science might become more poetic in the mind of the general public if such a belief were widely held, but would it be any more intelligible? Kuhn argues, however, that his view is more historically accurate for describing what real scientists have done. Further, it is not open to the charge of subjectivity because paradigms and their constituent metaphors are eminently community possessions whose principal value lies in their growing points. In contrast, a view of scientific theory that does not give a large place to metaphor, with its predictive value and potential for development, has trouble accounting for the very pro­ gressive aspect of science such views are most often interested in. If one feels he has a strong support for a view of objective science (i.e. separable from the historical context in which the science developed and separable from any heuristic props used in getting to pure formal theory) he will naturally feel that Kuhn's view of science is dangerously relativistic. In the second edition of The Structure rif Scientific Revolutions 4 CRYSTALS, FABRICS, AND FIELDS ( 1970), Kuhn answers such charges by refining his meaning of com­ munity. More is shared than the articulated theories. A whole system of assumptions, values, and techniques is involved. Paradigm as disciplinary matrix involves sharing ( 1) symbolic generalizations that give points of attachment for using logical and mathematical techniques in solving puzzles of normal science; ( 2) belief in the appropriateness ofparticular models, such as fields or atoms in a void; (3) values about such things as the place of prediction in an explana­ tion; and (4) exemplars or concrete typical solutions used in the literature and important to the formation of students.