Panpsychic Organicism: Sewall Wright’s Philosophy for Understanding Complex Genetic Systems

Abstract

The article reevaluates the reception of Mendelism in France, and more generally considers the complex relationship between Mendelism and plant breeding in the first half on the 20th century. It shows on the one side that agricultural research and higher education institutions have played a key role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in France, whereas university biologists remained reluctant to accept this approach on heredity. But on the other side, plant breeders, and agricultural researchers, despite an interest in Mendelism, never came to see it as the breeders' panacea, and regarded it instead as of only limited value for plant breeding.

The Organic Perspective To Cape Town-South Africa Shack Extraction

“…Organic designs are also defined as components of a philosophy which promotes harmony between human habitation and nature [12][13][14][15][16]. According to Steffes et al [17] this philosophy can be applied to several architectural aspects and settlement layouts.…”

Econometrics and Psychometrics: Rivers Out of Biometry

“…The persuade economists to adopt it. For Wright in biology see Provine (1986) and, for path analysis speci…cally, Wol ‡e (1999) and Ste¤es (2007); for his campaign in econometrics see Goldberger (1972) and Stock and Trebbi (2003) The collision-or con ‡uence-of biometry and Mendelism gave rise to two forms of structural inference: studies in theoretical population genetics which took the facts as described by the parameter values of a multinormal distribution as given and asked whether a Mendelian interpretation could be given; Mendelian research in which parameters based on over-identi…ed multinomial distributions or-in the case of path analysis-exactly identi…ed multinormals. There was some parallel activity in psychology, although there the over-identi…ed distributions were multinormal and not multinomial.…”

Integrative levels and ‘the Great Evolution’: Organicist biology and the sociology of Norbert Elias

“…Organicist biology pointed to complexity -the irreducible, emergent dynamics of the whole consequent upon the pattern of organisation of the parts -to refute the reductionist claims of physical science. Although Needham's formulation was the best known, both he (1937: 15) and Von Bertalanffy (1968) gave credit to Woodger' s Biological Principles (1929) for first outlining the orthodox position, whilst Waddington (1957) gave credit to Henderson (1917) and Sewall Wright identified Moore (1912) as the first modern statement of philosophical organicism (see Steffes, 2007). What is certainly true is that the language and epistemological logic of these very debates seem to have been absorbed almost wholesale by Elias.…”