The biologists Brian Goodwin and Mae-Wan Ho, colleagues at the Open University, both argued that a living organism is a whole that organises itself, not a machine built and driven by its genes. Goodwin held that the forms of living things arise from the dynamics of the developing body as a whole, and called for a science of qualities and meaning as well as quantities; Ho described the organism as a coherent whole held together by flows of energy through every part. Whole species, and the Earth itself, are more again: living, conscious beings.
Who was Brian Goodwin? #
A Canadian mathematical biologist, born in Montreal in 1931, who died in Devon in 2009. He studied biology at McGill University, mathematics at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and took his doctorate at Edinburgh under the developmental biologist Conrad Hal Waddington. He taught at the University of Sussex and then, until 1992, as a professor at the Open University. He was a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, a centre for the study of complex systems, and in his later years helped to start the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College in Devon.1
What did Goodwin argue? #
That genes cannot explain the shapes of living things on their own. In How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (1994) and other work, he argued that the forms of organisms arise from what he called morphogenetic fields, the organised patterns of influence spread through the whole developing embryo, such as gradients of chemical signals, which shape it as a whole. Many of the forms we see, on this view, are what the dynamics of a complex living system tend to produce of their own accord, and natural selection plays a secondary part, choosing among forms more than creating them.2
He also argued for a different kind of science. In his essay “Gaia and Holistic Science” (2007) he held that science had reached the point where complex systems could be seen to have values of the kind we recognise in health, coherence and well-being, and where words like ‘meaning’ could legitimately be applied to what natural systems do, such as the life cycle of an organism or the way an ecosystem keeps itself whole and in balance. He wanted to bring quality into scientific thinking alongside quantity, and to end the split between nature and culture; his last book, Nature’s Due (2007), has a chapter called “Evolution with Meaning”. He was also a supporter of Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth’s living and non-living parts regulate one another as a whole.3 See What is the Gaia hypothesis, and who was James Lovelock?
Who was Mae-Wan Ho? #
A geneticist and biophysicist, born in 1941, who died in 2016. She took her doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Hong Kong in 1967, and later taught genetics at the Open University, where she became reader in biology. With Peter Saunders she produced Beyond Neo-Darwinism (1984), and she went on to co-found and direct the Institute of Science in Society, which published on genetic engineering, climate change and other subjects.4
What did Ho argue? #
That an organism is a coherent whole, and that physics can help show how. Her best-known book, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms (1993), takes the reader through areas of modern physics, from the thermodynamics of systems far from equilibrium to liquid crystals and fractals, in search of what makes something alive.5 She began from the patterns that form of their own accord when energy flows through matter, such as the rolling cells that appear in a liquid heated from below and the coloured, pulsing spirals of certain chemical reactions, the dissipative structures described by the chemist Ilya Prigogine. Living things, on her account, take this much further. Energy is taken in, stored and passed on through finely coupled processes at every scale, from molecules to the whole body, so that the organism becomes more and more coherent, each part in step with the whole.6 She also argued that coherence effects at the quantum scale, right across the organism, play a key role in the emergence of consciousness.6
Like Goodwin, she argued that evolution has many mechanisms besides random mutation and selection, and she advocated a form of Lamarckian evolution, in which what happens to an organism in its life can affect what is passed on.7
What did critics say? #
Both met strong criticism from mainstream evolutionary biology. In a review titled “Structurally Unsound” in the journal Evolution in 1995, Catherine Price held that Goodwin offered an alternative source of variation but not an alternative to natural selection as the cause of adaptation, and found his discussion of evolution biased, underdeveloped and poorly informed.8 The evolutionary biologist Günter Wagner described Goodwin’s approach as a fringe movement, and Richard Dawkins said he saw little good evidence for it, whilst valuing the debate it raised. Others, including the biologist David Wake, supported his work, and Goodwin himself did not reject Darwinism, only what he saw as its excesses.9
Ho’s critics included the palaeontologist Philip Gingerich, who held that her evolutionary ideas rested on vitalism, and plant scientists who rejected her warnings about genetically modified crops; the pharmacologist David Colquhoun criticised her writing on homeopathy. On the other side, some of the ideas she championed, about organisms passing on more than their genes, have since entered mainstream evolutionary writing, in the work of biologists such as James Shapiro and Eva Jablonka.10
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In seeing the whole as real, and as more than its parts. A Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is not an individual animal but the OversoulOversoul. A branch of Mother Earth representing the whole of a species: the single being all the individuals arise from. Lower-World work is always with the Oversoul, never an individual; environments are composite Oversouls, wheels within wheels. More about this of its species: Panther in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, the sum of all panthers, from which every individual panther springs, and an infinitely wiser being than any one of them.11 The Plant People are understood in the same way. An individual grass plant is a minute part of a vastly bigger whole, and all the grass plants on the planet are part of one single consciousness, which is why Plant species are described as vast interdimensional beings. Each individual plant, wherever it grows, is connected to the whole of its species, much as the trillions of cells in a human body, each with little or no self-awareness, together make up a single person.12 See What is an Oversoul?
Goodwin’s idea that a body takes shape from the field of the whole is close to the understanding that the physical matter of everyday reality is organised and held together by patterns, or blueprints, in a deeper reality.13 And his insistence that words like meaning and health belong in the study of living systems is close to the Soul of every thing, what it was born to be, which is both the blueprint for how it could appear in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and the drive to become it.14
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In what kind of whole it is, and how it is known. Goodwin and Ho were scientists arguing about the organism, the embryo and the ecosystem as systems to be studied, and the wholes they described are physical and biological ones. Here the whole is also a being. The Oversoul of a species, the Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this are persons with their own wisdom, met directly in journeys to the Lower-World, not only inferred from patterns in the middle-world. At one level everything is part of a greater whole, and at another some parts have more sense of individuality than others;15 the work is to come into relationship with both.
Nor does it stop at living things. Goodwin and Ho were asking what makes something alive, as against inert matter. In shamanism everything, the Stone People included, is made of energy that is alive and conscious, and the usual Western line between living and non-living things does not hold.16 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
