The Road(s) Not Taken: from Lamarck to Lovelock

Abstract

The palace acknowledges that Cinderella has moved into her dotage. In fact, she is clinically demented and delusional. She sits in the corner of her well-appointed chambers, recollecting her past glories and her successful, biotech offspring. Biochemists, biophysicists, computational biologists, crystallographers, etc. visit her on (rare) occasions and amuse her with the latest gossip, but their munificence is tempted by her beneficence and quickly terminated by her ruminations on exhausted problems and feckless solutions. The new natural scientists have already consigned Cinderella to history.

In the light of past successes, this optimism that all the problems of biology can ultimately be solved mechanistically is understandable. But a realistic opinion about the prospects for mechanistic explanation must depend on more than historical extrapolation; it can only be formed after a consideration of the outstanding problems of biology, and of the ways in which they might conceivably be solved.

Rupert Sheldrake, 1995:19