The Intuitive Wisdom of Early Holistic Biology
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 1772-1844 was of the 'founding-fathers-of-modern-biology-generation' which included Wolfgang Goethe whom he much admired, Jean Baptise Lamarck and his other French contemporary George Cuvier, with whom he debated many fundamental biological concepts in a famous 1830s debate, which actually lasted some 12 years. Geoffroy can be considered something of a prescient intuitive, whose holistic ideas, though much misunderstood, have been vindicated by modern developmental genetics. Saint-Hilaire demonstrated what Zen calls Prajna - the intuitive wisdom that sees the relational character of everything. He spent his career promoting a species of Germanic or Goethean 'nature philosophy' that indicates that all animals demonstrate a unity of composition far more significant than their apparent differences.

Visionary Naturalist, a translation by Marjorie Green of the 1998 French edition, takes us back to the debates between Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier over the very essence of biological organisation. Although the original papers and presentations were often turgid and excessively personal and wordy, it is worth the investment to glean the fundamental concepts that were being debated, and to see how they are convergent with much modern systems thinking - and a perennial antidote to linear thinking and undue reductive simplification.

Thus, Geoffroy saw 'the whole animal kingdom ... as but a single being.' This 'principle of unity' anticipated our present concepts of biosphere and Gaia but not merely in a vague or generalised way. Geoffroy was an expert on animal anatomy, having an 'exquisite feeling' for crocodiles (after a trip to Egypt) and expertise in subjects as diverse as fish, arthropods and the human/primate hyoid bone. His 'theory of analogies' is still fundamental to holistic biology today. Like his 'principle of connections' it demonstrates the 'unity of composition' which causes all forms, however diverse in superficial appearance, to exhibit similar organisation (head, trunk, limbs, tail in recognisable sequence A, B, C, etc,). Even when an organ is not present, its loss might be explained, as not yet having appeared: so a missing bone might still be potentially present in the developmental stage of cartilage or tissue. This plasticity and diversity in development was philosophically reminiscent of Leibniz's 'variety in unity' and is organisationally understood as a 'compensation principle' (Goethe 1795) or what Geoffroy calls the 'balancement of organs.' In any organism 'none of its parts can change without [all] the others changing too.' Thus, as the tadpole loses its tail, its trunk, limbs and head expand to produce frog anatomy.

Geoffroy saw evolution as much like development: 'the unfolding of a predetermined plan of organisation that becomes step by step more complex in the course of time.' This ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny precursor notion foreshadowed Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law defined almost two generations later. Geoffroy also understood the endless possible modifications to development 'whether stopping early or persevering to the limit.' 'Such is the ocean of actions, or perturbations, and of resistances in which the powers of animal organisation are exercised.' So organ A will be in its usual relation to C even if B is not yet formed. This is borne out by modern developmental studies.

Geoffroy went further. He saw analogies and connections between invertebrates and vertebrates that Cuvier and others could not, and postulated that they can be unified by simply transposing dorsal and ventral organisation, conceptually with the 'eyes of the mind.' This so called 'transcendental' anatomy (which can see the place of missing organ B, or the invisible relations between belly and back of vertebrate and invertebrate) has been found to be remarkably prescient.

According to Le Guyader, the punch line came like a 'thunderbolt' in the 1980s and 1990s when developmental genetics showed that the rhythmic 'ballet of cells that lead ... to the construction of an animal' causes the same (homologous) genes that code for dorsal orientation in the fruit fly to code for ventral in vertebrates (toads) and vice versa! The late Stephen J. Gould celebrated this prescience in an article entitled Geoffroy and the Homeobox noting 'the art of finding timeless essences in apparent trifles is the kind of perception that we call genius.' Geoffroy's 1822 paper on the unity of organic composition (conceived in the 1790s) suddenly appeared in the references lists of 1990s papers in Nature and Science. Geoffroy had returned to 'the first level of the international scientific scene.'

C. S. Lewis once characterised the prejudice that new ideas are better than old as 'chronological chauvinism.' Geoffroy (and Goethe - his sometime mentor) suffered similar prejudices as their holistic approaches were branded as delirious 'dreams' and 'romantic' fantasies, and Darwinian 'selectionism' edged out both French and German evolutionary thinking. But one cannot deny that the visionary 'eyes of the mind' grasped fundamental essences that unify what the eyes of reductionism cannot see.

Geoffroy's unifying evolutionary vision had its moments of ascendancy in the early 1800s, but his intuitive insights were soon superseded by Cuvier's compartmentalised ideas about anatomical classification, which separated species into discrete 'fixed' forms. Because Cuvier did not believe in evolution, but commanded great influence as a talented orator- a gift Geoffroy lacked - the 1830s debates have sometimes been characterised as a stark polarisation of views: evolutionism v. fixed creationism, revolutionary progressivism v. conservatism (the 'noble' Cuvier was lucky to survive the French revolution) or catastrophism v. gradualism. Others say Cuvier was wrong for 'right' reasons while Geoffroy was right for 'wrong' reasons. (This is too trite: both made great contributions and significant errors). Nonetheless, the lesson is surely that the mysteries of evolution and development are profound and should not dismiss visionaries like Geoffroy who helped penetrate them. Geoffroy and Cuvier remind us that, ultimately, concepts of biological diversity (separation) v. unity (relatedness), like yin and yang or holism and reductionism are just two complementary poles of our conceptual world.