Waddington, Conrad Hal (1905-75)
Waddington, Conrad Hal (1905-75)
Embryologist and geneticist, born in Evesham, Worcestershire. He studied at Cambridge, and became professor of animal genetics at Edinburgh (1947-70). He introduced important concepts into evolutionary theory, envisaging a mechanism by which Lamarckianism could be incorporated into orthodox Darwinian genetics. He wrote a standard textbook, Principles of Embryology (1956), and also helped to popularize science in such general books as The Ethical Animal (1960).
From Tools For Thought:
from chapter 2, section B, something pertaining to my NEXA major in particular and the confluence of the sciences in general:
"It is very obvious that no single man can 'know' all of this information, or even have very ready access to it; but he may be able to find any particular item, if he searches hard enough for it. The consequences of this may be that it becomes easier to rediscover a fact rather that to find out whether somebody else has already deiscovered and described it. One gets the impression that in somee branches of science, such as parts of biology which are still floundering about in search of firm theoretical framework, a good deal of current research is already of this kind: an earnest yound worker coming up with what seems to him a novel discovery, which in fact was well known about fifty years previously, although forgotten or neglected in the interim. This 'rediscovery phenomenon' may well become one of the major factors limiting the rate of advance of science.
"Another effect of the scientific information is that it encourages specialization. There is no evidence that the man of today can remember, and have at his fingertips, many more items than could his predecessor two centuries ago, when 1,000 fewer journals were being published. He has perforce to narrow the range of topics on which he is well informed, though not necessarily by a factor of a 1,000, since, as we saw before, the development of theoretical insight makes it possible to sum up large masses of information under the heading of a single concept. Nevertheless, the narrowing range must be quite considerable.
"Attempts to overcome this difficulty by inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary teaching can only be successful up to a point. If, as seems to be necessary, one assumes that roughly speaking the amount that any one person can know is approximately fixed, there is no use thinking that by teaching a student two or three subjects one can get him to know as much about these subjects as do specialists who study only one of them. The purpose of inter-disciplinary teaching is best considered as the production of a different mix of interests which seems particularly relevant to important problems of the time, rather than the impossible task of adding one existing specialism to another."
A rather poignant example of that principle of "rediscovery" usually cited comes from the early half of this century, when in 1925 Werner Heisenberg basically reinvented a form of matrix equations to describe behavior at the quantum level. James Gleick's Chaos: the Making of a New Science also abounds with tales of nineteenth century mathematical curiosities, such as the Koch snowflake or Cantor dust, which sat fruitlessly for over a hundred years until some physicists studying dynamic systems found that these equations could accurately model certain real-world situations.
Some interesting thoughts on hierarchies:
"The still only partially solved problem is: when is one tempted, or when is it justified, to analyse a complicated system into a hierarchical structure involving different levels? The best answer that seems to be available is that we do this when, having analysed the complex into a number of more elementary units, we look at the relationships of these units and find that the inter-relations fall into a few separate classes with few intermediates. For instance, there may be a number of quite strong interactions and a number of weaker ones, but few in between; or the activities going on in the system may be classified into very fast ones and very slow ones, again with few intermediaries. If you found yourself confronted with an army with a strange uniform, whose insignia of rank you did not understand, you would find, if you were allowed to observe things, that there was some individual who would spend five minutes deciding that B company would advance along that road, accompanied by X battery of artillery; and B company and X battery would spend the next couple of hours trying to do so; while this person had gone on in the next five minutes to say that a squadron of fighter bombers would carry out a raid lasting for four hours on some other target and, long before they had done that, would order the tanks to do something else. He would be acting on a time scale much faster than that of the people he was interacting with. This would be good grounds for saying that he was higher up on the hierarchy, at a level above, capable of and empowered to give orders to and delegate responsabilities to, the people at the levels below.
"The different classes of interactions need not always be connected with time scale. If you look at all the cells in the body of an animal, you find that they fall into groups with strong interactions between those in the same group (for instance all the kidney cells in the kidney, or all the liver cells in the liver), and much less interaction, though still some, between the kidney and the liver cells. You could then say that the cells were arranged in hierarchical organization, with organs such as kidney and liver forming a higher level, and the cells grouped under these various organs making up the level below. If one wants to ask, for instance, is a city a hierarchical organization?, one would have to look to see if one could detect important activities and interactions which fall into contrasting groups of intensity or time constants (I doubt if one would find many; I don not think that cities are hierarchically organized in their activities, though they may often be in their administrative apparatus)."
In this connection, consider Gregory Bateson's contention that an idea is any "difference which makes a difference." Also see Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin
Lastly, a description of his concept of the epigenetic landscape, culled from Looking Glass Universe by Briggs and Peat (1984):
" [C.H.] Waddington, believed the final form an individual embryo takes as it develops is not just given by a genetic blueprint. It is a result of the way genes interact with the environment. He suggested that the living system in its growth is like a river making its way downhill. If the river is dammed, it finds a new path for its flow. To illustrate this, he pictured what he called an 'epigenetic landscape,' a multidmensional world of hills and valleys.
"The epigenetic landscape is a picture of both the individual organism and the external environnment it develops in. Let's consider, for example, a developing fish. In the epigenetic landscape are what Waddington called 'chreodes,' well-worn pathways which represent the genetic tracks that a particular species of fish has followed in the past. When the fish egg and milt come together, the developing organism is set in motion like a ball rolling down the landscape. It will tend to follow beaten paths, the past genetic history. However, the landscape itself is in motion, like an ocean, shifting with predators and disease. The environment jostles the ballfish off its chreode and forces it to make a detour. To restore its internal energy balance, the ballfish pushes back and still reaches its final goal. The end result is an individual fish of the species. However, Waddington focused on the fact that this individual's development has subtly changed the landscape, subtly worn down a detour. If enough embryos are pressed by circumstances to make this detour in their own genetic structure, the detour may become a formal rerouting for the species. In this way, genetic structure and environment push against each other to create evolutionary types that are stable and always changing at the same time."
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