Life Forms: A Keyword Entry

References (58)

1. Timothy Lenoir, "Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biol- ogy," Isis 71, no. 1 (1980): 77-108, and Timothy Lenoir, "The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the Conditions of Existence in Goethe's Biological Thought," in Goethe and the Sciences, ed. F. Amrine, F. J. Zucker, and H. Wheeler (Dordrecht, 1987), 17-28. See also James L. Larson, Interpreting Nature: The Sci- ence of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore, 1994).
2. Joan Steigerwald, "Natural Purposes and the Reflecting Power of Judgment: The Problem of the Organism in Kant's Critical Philosophy," European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (2010): 291-308.
3. Lenoir, "Kant," 77. See Johannes Müller, "Schlussbemerkungen über die Entwickelungsvariationen der thierischen and menschlichen Lebensformen auf der Erde," in Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen (Coblenz, 1840), 768-78.
4. Evelyn Fox Keller, "Ecosystems, Organisms, and Machines," Bioscience 55, no. 12 (2005): 1069-74, 1070.
5. Steigerwald, "Goethe's Morphology," 292.
6. Ibid., 311.
7. Ibid., 308. Steigerwald differs from our interpretation and emphases here, arguing that the a priori at stake may be principles of judgment-the moorings of a transcendental idealism-rather than finally accessible archetypes. We thank Steigerwald for bearing with our sometimes heterodox readings.
8. Comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 1781 theory of the Bil- dungstrieb (building-drive) posited a formative impulse in organisms "respon- sible for reproduction, nourishment, and restoration of parts"; Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago, 2002), 219. Bildungstrieb was for Blumenbach "a teleological cause fully resident in nature"; Richards, Romantic Conception, 221, "a secondary cause yielding immediate effects and itself . . . the effect of some hidden primary cause" (277). Blumenbach imparted to his many students, including Alexander von Humboldt, Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer, and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a morphologically inflected Kantian philosophy in which scientific observation and aesthetic judgment were often entangled; see Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, 2008).
9. Theodor Ludwig Wilhelm Bischoff, "Über den Bau des Crocodil-Herzens, besonders von Crocodilus lucius," in Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wis- senschaftliche Medicin (Berlin, 1836), 10. Translation by Gisbert Helmreich.
10. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander von Humboldt, and Karl Heinrich Bran- des, Wilhelm von Humboldt's gesammelte Werke (Berlin, 1841), 529.
11. Historian of biology Joan Steigerwald (personal communication) writes that "the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Historical Dictionary of Philosophy) focuses entirely on the psychological, religious, philosophical and social uses of Lebensform, starting with Friedrich Schleiermacher (Psychol. Sämtl. Werke [1835-64] 3:6, 334 f), then W. Wundt (Ethik 1886, 135f), and then moving on to 20th century figures." This lineage of Lebensform takes us up to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his Philosophical Investigations (1953; reprint, New York, 1958) used Lebensform-always translated as "form of life" in English-to refer to a frame of reference within which linguistic action becomes meaningful.
12. Alexander von Humboldt, Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes (Paris, 1805). Trans- lated by Francesca Kern and Philippe Janvier in Foundations of Biogeography: Life Forms: A Keyword Entry
13. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, Dei Welträthsel: Gemeinverständliche Stu- dien über monistische Philosophie (Bonn, 1899).
14. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York, 1904).
15. See Ruth Rinard, "The Problem of the Organic Individual: Ernst Haeckel and the Development of the Biogenetic Law," Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 2 (1981): 249-75.
16. Haeckel's attention to symmetry, arrangement, and form strongly influenced Surrealist and Bauhaus artists, among them Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Klee wrote that "form is the end, death. Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life"; quoted in Mitchell Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 15, and "Starting from nature, the stu- dents will perhaps arrive at their own forms, and one day be themselves nature, construct like nature"; quoted in Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropol- ogy of the Contemporary (Princeton, 2008), 101. See also David Brody, "Ernst Haeckel and the Microbial Baroque," Cabinet, no. 7 (Summer 2002): 25-27.
17. Klee's demarcation of form and form-giving hearkens back to Schelling and the Jena Romantics, who believed that "nature, in both its inorganic and organic forms, is that 'middle' [das Mittel] between productivity and product, between the free and the fixed, the middle that is ever in a state of formation";
18. Steigerwald, "Cultural Enframing," 483. Schelling and the Jena Romantics fur- ther claimed that the artistic sensibility could succeed where rational observation failed, spanning the gulf between life's inner forces and outer manifestations by "comprehend[ing] how in natural products particular material is informed by a universal form" (484). The art connection suggests that another lineage for life form may be in life drawing. One touchstone for such a lineage may be Allan Harrison, "An Analysis of the Life-Form in Art," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 15, no. 2 (1875): 279-350.
19. "Electro-Magnetism," New Age, Concordium Gazette, and Temperance Advocate 1, no. 16 (1844): 203-5, 204.
20. "Theories of Human Origin," Anthropological Review 7, no. 24 (1869): 18.
21. This is the case even if Darwin's theory is being argued against. In 1878, Alexan- der Wilford Hall, a Methodist minister from New York, published The Problem of Human Life: Embracing the "Evolution of Sound" and "Evolution Evolved" (New York), in which he argues against both Darwinian theory and the wave theory of sound; see M. C. M. Wright, "A Short History of Bad Acoustics," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 120, no. 4 (2006): 1807-15. He wrote, "As the physical structure contains not only the different organs of the body but an almost infi- nite number and variety of separate molecules and units of real organic atoms, so the vital organism within each living creature contains not only the intrinsic life-form of the specific being it inhabits but is a veritable microcosm or a little universe of life-forms which include the intrinsic germs of all organic being [sic] wherever found"; Hall, Problem of Human Life, 415. Such a notion of natural his- tory, in which the earliest organism had all future organisms latent within it, is a throwback to earlier articulations of "evolution" by such figures as the Dutch insectologist Jan Swammerdam; Richards, Romantic Conception, 211. Life Forms: A Keyword Entry
22. On the last day of 1853, Charles Dickens asked about organisms to come in his poem "New Year's Eve": "In the dark yet lustrous Future / What life-forms may be curl'd!"; Charles Dickens, "New Year's Eve," Household Words: A Weekly Journal 8 (London, 1854): 418.
23. The fact that Victorians routinely used forms of life and organic forms without once mentioning life-forms reinforces our supposition that the English term was translated from German, and that lebensformen and life-forms did not emerge independently of each other.
24. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London, 1844), 149.
25. Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1850), clviii-clix.
26. William Whewell, The Plurality of Worlds (Boston, 1855), 256.
27. John Hedley Brooke, "Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observa- tions on the Brewster-Whewell Debate," Annals of Science 34, no. 3 (1977): 221-86.
28. David Brewster, More Worlds Than One: The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian (London, 1854), 97.
29. Edward Higginson, Astro-Theology; or The Religion of Astronomy (London, 1855), 80-81. Higginson regularly uses "forms of life" in his lectures to refer to organisms yet to be discovered. For example: "Surely we do not doubt the possibility of countless other forms of life, besides those with which we are actually acquainted!" (81) and "The discriminating circumstances revealed through the recent wonder- ful improvements in the telescope, if they make it more difficult to conceive that certain globes in our system are inhabited by forms of life at all resembling those with which we are familiar, render it more difficult still to doubt it as regards those others which are proved to resemble our globe very nearly in the physical circum- stances which specifically adapt it for human residence" (30).
30. C. Lloyd Morgan, "Physiography," American Naturalist 12, no. 10 (1878): 676.
31. Thomas Henry Huxley, The Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Huxley, ed. Michael Foster and Edwin Ray Lankester (London, 1901), 3:521.
32. Alpheus S. Packard, "Life and Nature in Southern Labrador," American Natural- ist 19, no. 3 (1885): 269-75, 270, and "On Certain Factors of Evolution," Ameri- can Naturalist 22, no. 261 (1888): 808-21, 820.
33. Alpheus S. Packard, "The Philosophical Views of Agassiz," American Naturalist 32, no. 375 (1898): 159-64.
34. Louis Agassiz, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America (Boston, 1857), 1:134.
35. Richards, Romantic Conception, 532. Or, as Alfred Russel Wallace later argued, teleological forces acted on a multiplicity of possible life forms, rather than upon a single species. Wallace wrote in a letter to Arabella Buckley, Charles Lyell's secretary, in March 1909: "Another point I am becoming more and more impressed with is, a teleology of fundamental laws and forces rendering development of the infinity of life-forms possible (and certain) in place of the old teleology applied to the production of each species"; in James Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (London, 1916), 2:89-90.
36. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) (Cambridge, MA, 1964), 328.
37. Ibid., 484. And see Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000), 48, for a discussion of how this rhetorical swerve may have been meant to satisfy creation- ist readers. We here leave to the side discussions of life and form emanating 73. Quoted in Keller, Making Sense, 64.
38. Ibid., 61. This vision was, in its way, Goetheian. Keller writes that for Thomp- son, form evoked "both the aesthetic notion of 'formal' and the mathematical notion of 'formalism'" (54).
39. Thompson, On Growth and Form, 269.
40. C. H. Waddington, Towards a Theoretical Biology: An IUBS Symposium (Chicago, 1968), 109.
41. Ibid., 111.
42. Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and R. Uribe, "Autopoiesis: The Orga- nization of Living Systems, Its Characterization, and a Model," BioSystems 5 (1974): 187-96.
43. Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (New York, 1994), 78.
44. Ibid., 87.
45. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford, 1993), 537.
46. See Doyle, Wetwares, 2003. For a review of concepts of "life" in primary and sec- ondary literature on Artificial Life, see Stefan Helmreich, "'Life Is a Verb': Inflections of Artificial Life in Cultural Context," Artificial Life 13, no. 2 (2007): 189-201.
47. Quoted in Kevin Kelly, "Designing Perpetual Novelty: Selected Notes from the Second Artificial Life Conference," in Doing Science: The Reality Club, ed. John Brockman (New York, 1991), 1.
48. Chris Langton, "Toward Artificial Life," Whole Earth Review 58 (1988): 74-79, 74.
49. Quoted in Linda Feferman, Simple Rules . . . Complex Behavior (video) (Santa Fe, NM, 1992). See also P. Prusinkiewicz and A. Lindenmeyer, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (Berlin, 1990).
50. Chris Langton, "What Is Artificial Life? The Digital Biology Project" (1994), available at http:/www.biota.org/papers/cglalife.html.
51. Science Fiction Citations, s.v. "alien life form," http://www.jessesword.com/sf/ view/12.
52. H. P. Lovecraft, The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (New York, 1987), 114. While this is the earliest use of "life form" in sci- ence fiction literature that we could identify, "form of life" did appear in Romantic and Victorian gothic fiction, as for example in Mary Shelley's 1837 Falkner: "To the surgeon's eye, a human body sometimes presents itself merely as a mass of bones, muscles, and arteries-though that human body may contain a soul to emulate Shakespeare-and thus there are moments when the wretched dissect the forms of life-and contemplating only the outward semblance of events, wonder how so much power of misery, or the reverse, resides in what is after all but sleeping or waking"; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley (London, 1996), 7:280-81, and Bram Stoker's Drac- ula (London, 1897): "Despises the meaner forms of life altogether, though he dreads being haunted by their souls" (272). A use of "life form" preceding its appearance in science fiction appears in the writings of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle wrote about the coagulation of ectoplasm into anthropomorphisms: "It is conceivable that the thinner emanation of the clairvoyant would extend far further than the R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S thick material ectoplasm, but have the same property of moulding itself into life, though the life forms would only be visible to the clairvoyant eye"; The Vital Message (New York, 1919), 150. Three years later, in 1922, Doyle would again employ the term, to speculate on the origin of fairies. He summarizes the theory of psychic researcher David Gow: "They are really life forms which have devel- oped along some separate line of evolution, and which for some morphological reason have assumed human shape in the strange way in which Nature repro- duces her types like the figures on the mandrake root or the frost ferns upon the window"; The Coming of the Fairies (Lincoln, NE, 2006), 148-49.
53. Gene Roddenberry, Harve Bennet, and Jack Sowards, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Hollywood, 1982).
54. From Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (New York, 1979), 123: "'Oh God,' muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their inde- pendence of computers." Ursula K. Le Guin employs the acronym HILF-"high intelligence life forms"-in several of her novels and short stories, treating it as a category cir- cumscribed both biologically and anthropologically. The titular protagonist of Rocannon's World is "a hilfer, an ethnologist of the High Intelligence Life Forms" (17), a sort of interstellar salvage ethnographer who carries the "Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms" (3). (Le Guin uses life form and life-form interchangeably.) Le Guin's almost Humboldtian use of life form as con- gruent with both custom and morphology is unsurprising, as Le Guin, daughter of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, often draws upon the ethnographic genre. As she explained in an interview with the Guardian: "Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind; so has Clifford Geertz"; "Chroni- cles of Earthsea" (2004), online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/feb/ 09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin. From Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) (New York, 1994): "'What's a crumble?' he asked, when the robot monitor answered. . . .'On Rigel two it means a small life-form which scuttles-'" (19).
55. For sociological accounts of synthetic biology, see Alain Pottage, "Too Much Ownership: Bio-prospecting in the Age of Synthetic Biology," BioSocieties 1, no. 2 (2006): 137-58; Paul Rabinow, "Biopower, Dignity, and Synthetic Anthropos," posted 8 June 2009 on the National Humanities Center's On The Human forum, http://onthehuman.org/2009/06/biopower-dignity-synthetic-anthropos/, and Adrian Mackenzie, "Design in Synthetic Biology," BioSocieties 5, no. 2 (2010): 180-98. An earlier practice traveling under the name synthetic biology came from Stéphane Leduc, who in 1912 published La Biologie Synthétique.
56. Dan Ferber, "Synthetic Biology: Microbes Made to Order," Science 303, no. 5655 (2004): 158-61, 161.
57. Rick Weiss, "Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms," Wash- ington Post, Monday, 17 December 2007, A01: and Annalee Newitz, "Mad Sci- ence Contest: Build a Lifeform and We'll Send You to Hong Kong or Give You $1000" (2008), online at http://io9.com/5022316/mad-science-contest-build- a-lifeform-and-well-send-you-to-hong-kong-or-give-you-1000.
58. Thomas Laqueur, "Form in Ashes," Representations 104 (Fall 2008): 50-72, 51. Life Forms: A Keyword Entry