Creative Holobionts
Conrad Waddington and the Intra-Action of Science, Art and Philosophy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v34i69.160663Keywords:
Waddington, Whitehead, Process Philosophy, Transdisciplinarity, Academia, Science, BiologyAbstract
This article takes the work and life of Conrad Waddington to illustrate the point that science, art and humanities can be mutually constituting fields that each bring light to aspects of reality that the others may not yet have the tools or the language for and that they can thereby work together to bring new revelations and progress. Borrowing a term from Lynn Margulis, I call this interaction a Creative
Holobiont. The article puts Waddington’s work on the development of organisms in the context of metaphysical questions of change and difference and describes his inspiration from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It then moves on to touch upon later discoveries in biology which take us beyond the individual organism to a fully relational view of life. Finally, it discusses how this view has
been represented in artistic works recently and in the past.
References
1 C. H. Waddington, An Introduction to Modern Genetics (Macmillan, 1939); Organisers & Genes (Cambridge University Press, 1940); How Animals Develop (Allen & Unwin, 1946); Principles of Embryology (Macmillan, 1956); The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology (Allen & Unwin, 1957); New Patterns In Genetics & Development (Columbia University Press, 1962); Towards a Theoretical Biology 1: Prologema (Edinburgh University Press, 1968); Towards a Theoretical Biology 2: Sketches (Edinburgh University Press, 1969); Towards a Theoretical Biology 3: Drafts (Edinburgh University Press, 1970); Towards a Theoretical Biology 4: Essays (Edinburgh University Press, 1972); Principles of Development and Differentiation (Macmillan, 1966).
2 C. H. Waddington, The Evolution of an Evolutionist (Cornell University Press, 1975), 2.
3 K. Lee Chichester, “Conrad H. Waddington and the Image of Process Biology,” in Drawing Processes of Life: Molecules, Cells, Organisms, ed. Gemma Anderson-Tempini and John Dupré (Intellect Ltd, 2024), 19.
4 C. H. Waddington, Tools for Thought (Paladin, 1977), xiii.
5 Waddington, Tools for Thought, xiii.
6 C. H. Waddington, Behind Appearance: A Study of the Relations between Painting and the Natural Sciences in This Century (Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 155.
7 Waddington, Organisers & Genes, frontispiece.
8 C.H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology (Allen & Unwin, 1957), 29.
9 Examples are abundant but there’s no need to call out a particular scientific paper as an example of a simplistic illustration.
10 Waddington, Behind Appearance, 155.
11 James E. Ferrell, “Bistability, Bifurcations, and Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape,” Current Biology 22, no. 11 (2012): R458–66, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.045.
12 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (The Free Press, 1978), 208.
13 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 208.
14 Whitehead’s use of the term concrescence is complex. For an overview, see John W. Lango, “Towards Clarifying Whitehead’s Theory of Concrescence,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 7, no. 3 (1971): 150–67.
15 Mark L. Siegal and Aviv Bergman, “Waddington’s Canalization Revisited: Developmental Stability and Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 16 (6 August 2002): 10528–32, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.102303999.
16 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 211.
17 Alfred North Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (Rider and Company, 1948), 64.
18 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Pelican Mentor Books, 1948), 18.
19 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 105.
20 Whitehead, Process and Reality, xi.
21 Yves Delage, cited in Joseph Needham, “Organicism in Biology,” Journal of Philosophical Studies 3, no. 9 (1928): 29–40.
22 John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson, “A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology,” in Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, ed. Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré (Oxford University Press, 2018), 8.
23 Today this view is called “systems biology” and a brilliant explanation of it is found in Denis Noble’s The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes (Oxford University Press, 2006).
24 C. H. Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (Penguin Books, 1948), 26.
25 Sagan (later Margulis) “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 14, no. 3 (1 March 1967): 225-IN6, https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(67)90079-3.
26 Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky, Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, ed. Lynn Margulis, trans. Victor Fet (Harvard University Press, 2010).
27 For a summary of examples, see Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 325–41, https://doi.org/10.1086/668166.
28 See e.g. David Griffiths, “Queer Theory for Lichens,” UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies 19 (13 October 2015): 36–45, https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/40249; and Pierre-Olivier Méthot and Samuel Alizon, “What Is a Pathogen? Toward a Process View of Host-Parasite Interactions,” Virulence 5, no. 8 (2014): 775–85, https://doi.org/10.4161/21505594.2014.960726.
29 Lynn Margulis, “Symbiogenesis and Symbionticism,” in Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis, ed. Lynn Margulis and René Fester (MIT Press, 1991), 2.
30 Lynn Margulis, “Big Trouble in Biology: Physiological Autopoiesis versus Mechanistic Neo-Darwinism,” in Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution, ed. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (Springer, 1997), 273.
31 Tobias Rees, Thomas Bosch, and Angela E. Douglas, “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self,” PLOS Biology 16, no. 2 (2018): 4, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005358.
32 “Humanities,” in Encyclopaedia Britanica, accessed 11 January 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/ humanities. In The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987) Allan Bloom writes that the difference between social sciences and humanities is that “social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not” (p. 357). As we have seen, Waddington’s works challenges this distinction as he insists on unpredictability even in the natural sciences.
33 Rees, Bosch, and Douglas, “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self,” 6.
34 Chichester, “Conrad H. Waddington and the Image of Process Biology,” 12. This is reminiscent of Gilles
Deleuze’s statement that the “task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible.” Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 56.
35 Chichester, “Conrad H. Waddington and the Image of Process Biology,” 13.
36 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 33. Whitehead uses the term “internal relations” to refer to relations that ontologically precede and constitute the relata (another point of convergence between Whitehead and Barad), Process and Reality, 59.
37 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, ix.
38 Eugene Gendlin, “Introduction to Thinking at the Edge,” The Folio 19, no. 1 (2004): 1–8.
39 The title of Haraway’s dissertation was “The Search for Organizing Relations: An Organismic Paradigm in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology,” later published as Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (Yale University Press, 1976).
40 See e.g. chapter 3 in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016); and p. 31 in When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
41 A search on this journal’s website reveals 7 articles that mention Haraway published in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics in the years 2018-2024.
42 Adam Bencard, Malthe Kouassi Bjerregaard, and Jacob Lillemose, eds., The World Is in You: Documentation, Reflections, Lessons (Medical Museion, 2022).
43 See Helga Ögmundardóttir and Eysteinn Bragason, “Compostories: Exploring Narratives of More-than- Human Relations in Soil Communities,” Cultural Analysis
22, no. 2 (2024): 17–36, as well as the other articles in the same issue of Cultural Analysis.
44 Gemma Anderson-Tempini, Berta Verd, and Johannes Jaeger, “Drawing to Extend Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape,” in Drawing Processes of Life: Molecules, Cells, Organisms, ed. Gemma Anderson-Tempini and John Dupré (Intellect Ltd, 2024), 83–98; Gemma Anderson-Tempini, Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science (Intellect Ltd, 2018).
45 Heather Barnett, “Drawing Out the Superorganism: Artistic Intervention and the Amplification of Processes of Life,” in Drawing Processes of Life: Molecules, Cells, Organisms, ed. Gemma Anderson-Tempini and John Dupré (Intellect Ltd, 2024), 201–26.
46 Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, “The Nordic Raven Totem,” Nordic Animism, 2021, https://nordicanimism.com/blog/the-nordic-raven-totem.
47 Two examples of this cultural work could be Danish author Rune Engelbreth Larsen who recently published the tome Animisme - Fra Klippekunst Til Klimakrise (Dana, 2025) and the scholar-activist Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen who works in multi-artistic ways to recover traditional knowledge of creating and maintaining land-connectedness and kinship with other-thanhumans (https://nordicanimism.com). One could also consider the Icelandic campaign to have the glacier Snæfellsjökull nominated for the 2024 presidential elections as a way to publicly engage with the personhood and rights of more-than-human nature (see https://kjosumjokul.com/).
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