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The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science pp 125–151Cite as

Looking at Embryos: The Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form

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Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science ((BSPS,volume 182))

Abstract

The title of this essay implies that there is an aesthetic of living organisms and that the aesthetic of embryology differs from those of other areas of biology. First, we believe that one can seriously discuss the aesthetics of the embryo much as one would discuss the aesthetics of an artist’s creation. Terms such as symmetry, balance, pattern, rhythm, form, and integration are crucial in both disciplines and are used in similar fashions.2 The scientist observing the embryo can act analogously to a critic, and the different sub-disciplines of biology are not unlike different schools of literary or art criticism. Indeed, all our knowledge of cells is based on interpretations of visual abstractions. Different stains and lenses emphasize different structures in the cell, and autoradiograms are used to imply functional relationships. Centrifugation analysis of cell components also gives us radioactive and enzymological data that are then placed back onto a map of the cell. As Oscar Schotte pointed out, the embryologist’s visualization of the cell differs from the geneticist’s visualization of the cell. Thus, there are different “schools” of biology. Some (such as physiology) seek the “meaning” of a structure; while others (such as cell and molecular biology) regard the animal’s general structure as relatively unimportant and look for unifying concepts and mechanisms underlying the apparent diversity of structures.

The greatest progressive minds of embryology have not searched for hypotheses; they have looked at embryos. - Jane Oppenheimer1

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Hans Holtfreter, embryologist and artist, who died, November 13, 1992, and to Dr. N. J. Berrill who celebrated his 90th birthday in April, 1993. Our thanks to Fred Tauber for encouraging these reflections, Michael Somers for his copy of Russell, Rick Eldridge and Alex Juhasz for discussing art and film criticism, respectively, Michael Marrissen for demonstrating the remarkable differences in interpreting the notes of Pachelbel’s Canon, and Colin Hecht and Eileen Crist for pointing out some textual ambiguities.

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Notes

  1. Oppenheimer, J. M., ‘Analysis of development: Problems, concepts, and their history’, in B. H. Willier, P. A. Weiss and V. Hamburger (eds.), Analysis of Development (Philadelphia: Saunders Press, 1955), pp. 1–24.

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  2. That natural forms can be the subject of aesthetics is emphasized in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, trans, by J. H. Bernard (NY: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 177–181. He specified the such aesthetics would concern the “beautiful forms of nature” and not the “charms that she is wont to combine so abundantly with them….” Moreover, if the beauty of natural forms interests a man, “we have reason for attributing to him, at least, a basis for a good moral character”. As will be discussed later, Kant’s combination of teleology and organicism had great appeal to embryologists.

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  3. The Schotte example is quoted (with illustration) in Sander, K., ‘The role of genes in ontogenesis’, in T. J. Horder, J. A. Witkowski and C. C. Wylie (eds.), A History of Embryology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 363–395.

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  4. Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (NY: Viking Press, 1983) has pointed out that science criticism should exist parallel to literary criticism, but likening science to art criticism has also been made by the Princeton embryologist, J. T. Bonner. He notes that readers of his book on Morphogenesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 6–7, might think that in discussing the components of the embryo, he will lose the main point in all the details. He continues that “I will be put in the same category as an art historian who analyzes the perspective of a Flemish master and is accused of failing to see that the pictures themselves are great and beautiful. But the chances are excellent that the art historian will first have been motivated by the beauty, and I suspect that those who study nature, even if only subconsciously, were also first motivated by noble emotions”.

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  30. Given such an attitude which characterized embryology as artistic and emotional, it became very difficult for embryologists who wanted reputations as analytic scientists to admit to having such feelings. Even Johannes Holtfreter, who certainly maintained a reputation for analytic embryological research, wrote (letter to SFG, Feb. 8. 1988) that “My artistic inclinations I have kept a secret from my colleagues”. The situation is analogous to those German biologists who refused to voice their views on eugenics even though they knew it was wrong and dangerous. To voice one’s opinions would suggest that one was not a serious, objective scientist (J. B. Jenkins on interview with Curt Stern in 1976, pers.comm.). Even today, scientists who voice aesthetic or political views are in danger of not being taken as seriously by their colleagues.

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  32. Weiss, P., ‘Beauty and the beast: Life and the rule of order’, Sci. Monthly 81: 286–299, 1955. For an appreciation of the visual embryological aesthetic very similar to that of Weiss, see Waddington, op. cit., 1951, where the same freedom within order is mentioned, and is linked directly to Whitehead’s aesthetics. Weiss explicitely depicts the freedom-within-order of the embryo as a model for politics as well.” And politically, it ought to be our cue… Freedom within the law: responsible freedom to move within an orbit as wide as, but no wider than what is compatible with the preservation of the over-all order that defines the harmony of relationships on which effective living and survival depend”. The embryo as a political model was used by others such as Just, Goldschmidt, and Waddington (Gilbert, op. cit., 1988). O. Hertwig (1985) explicitely uses the embryo and society as analogies for one another. Certainly, given that each embryo has a telos, embryology does not engender either a surrealistic or decadent aesthetic. Although not mentioned in Weiss’ paper, there does appear to be an aesthetic of the grotesque for the results of abnormal development. Grotesqueries and malformations have long been a source of wonder quite apart of the “normative” aesthetic of embryology (see Hamburger, V. and Born, W., ‘Monsters in nature and art’, CIBA Symp. 9(5/6): 666, 1947; Fiedler, L., Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1978). Here “beautiful pathology” (a term similar in meaning to “textbook pathology” and used to cover numerous diseases and aberrations) resides in the amount of deviation from the expected norms of health and proportion. Such results are ab-normal, mal-formed, or de-formed; i.e., they deviate from the norm that is the expected physical and aesthetic range. However, as pointed out by Pere Alberch (The logic of monsters: Evidence for internal constraint in development and evolution’, Geobios 12: 21–57, 1989), there are specific patterns of deviation, and teratologists have long classified the results of abnormal development into a limited number of categories. Not just any type of deviation is allowed, and these follow certain laws. In the Drosophila mutation Antennapedia, legs extend from the antennal sockets. However, these legs are point-for-point homologous to the antennae they replaced. The embryos that result in these malformed stages can be quite beautiful by the standards mentioned here, and they often result from the retention of earlier types of symmetry. In Drosophila mutants such as bicoid, bicaudal, or engrailed, for instance, anterior-posterior polarity is replaced by mirror-image duplication.

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  39. For discussion of Goethe’s “unity of plan” and its bearing on his research on the intermaxillary bone, see Russell, E. S., Form and Function (London: Murray Publishers, 1916), p. 46. For a fuller commentary on Goethe’s aesthetics and science, see Tauber, F., this volume.

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  46. Just, op. cit., 1939, preface. “Nature has neither kernel nor shell; it is all everywhere”. Kern is a pun on the German word for nucleus and Schale also refers, in Just’s book, to the cell membrane, the shell of the cell. The full quotation (which would probably have been known — at least by other embryologists if not by geneticists) went: “Oh, you Philistines who would think that Nature has bounds”.

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  47. Ibid., p. 368.

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  48. Ibid., p. 26. Since we will be dealing with experimental embryology, we will not be considering this earlier, naturalistic, tradition. For an account of Hertwig’s and Müller’s aesthetics of observation, see Cassirer, op. cit., 1970, pp. 176–187.

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  49. Ibid., p. 369. In this, Just also follows Goethe: “Dann hat die Teile in seiner Hand,/Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band”. [Then he has all the parts within his hand/Excepting only, sad to say, the living bond.]

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  50. Weiss, P., ‘Ross Granville Harrison 1870–1959: A memorial minute’, Rockefeller Inst. Quart. p. 6, 1960. Here we have an aesthetic theory of nature that appears to extend that of the pre-Critical Kant. Beauty is to be found phenomenally in the object, and we know it is beautiful because it resonates with certain faculties of the mind. Weiss would go further and say that we recognize it as beautiful only because our brains were constructed by the same rules of order. One theme that often arises is that Nature is the supreme artist, but the scientist must also be an artist (of a lesser kind) in order to appreciate it. Spemann, H., Embryonic Development and Induction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 367 says this forcefully: “I should like to work like the archaeologist who pieces together the fragments of a lovely thing which are alone left to him. as he proceeds, fragment by fragment, he is guided by the conviction that these fragments are part of a larger whole which, however, he does not yet know. He must be enough of an artist to recreate, as it were, the work of the master, but he dare not build according to his own ideas. Above all, he must keep holy the broken edges of the fragments; in that way only may he hope to fit new fragments into the restoration of the master’s creation”. In some cases, such as Emil Witschi, the scientist had been trained in art before being drawn to embryology (J. Opitz, pers. comm.).

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  63. In an interesting way, genetics and embryology took on traditional male and female aesthetics. Genetics became a biology of control and regulation (see Baltimore, D., The brain of a cell’, Science 84 [Nov]: 149–151, 1984; Keller, E. F., Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)).

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  89. Perhaps this is why von Baer could not support the theory of evolution, even though Darwin utilized von Baer’s conception of embryogenesis to support his theory. In Darwin’s view, the adult form was not an end that imposed itself upon the earlier stages. In both the progressive unilinear and the branched-tree conceptions of evolution, the end result does not determine the early stages of development. J. W. McAllister (‘Truth and beauty in scientific reason’, Synthese 78: 25–51, 1989) has shown that scientific revolutions can also cause “aesthetic ruptures” and that the allegiances of scientists to prior aesthetic committments can hinder their acceptance of the new hypothesis.

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  1. Swarthmore Clollege, Swarthmore, PA, USA

    Scott F. Gilbert & Marion Faber

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    Alfred I. Tauber

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Gilbert, S.F., Faber, M. (1996). Looking at Embryos: The Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form. In: Tauber, A.I. (eds) The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 182. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1786-6_6

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