To the Editor:

As an amateur of biology and the other sciences I am grateful to Marjorie Grene for her essay on Adolf Portmann [“Beyond Darwinism,” November ’65]. To borrow one of her favorite words, Portmann seems particularly authentic as a spokesman for Swiss science working at Basel, the city of Burckhardt and Nietzsche. His leading notions of autonomy, hierarchy, visibility, self-expression and the importance of the “inner life” of nature seem to spring directly from Swiss soil. After a second reading of New Paths in Biology (1964), I’m also grateful for the economy and clarity of his writing, his obviously vast and meticulous laboratory experience.

Mrs. Grene, however, seems to me guilty of one serious distortion. Nowhere in New Paths—which one can assume to embody his latest thinking—does one encounter the words “authentic” or “inauthentic,” words given a strong emotional charge two decades ago by the polemics around existentialism. Lionel Trilling notes in Beyond Culture that these are museum curators’ words, and I rather suspect they gained their initial charge from the great sums of money that hung on their utterance or non-utterance in the age of Berenson and Duveen. They also lend themselves to a certain gutteral emphasis meant to bring one’s opponent up short and adjourn the argument to realms of emotion. The adjectives actually used by Portmann are a good deal more neutral: “addressed” and “unaddressed,” “direct” and “indirect” phenomena.

In a sense, of course, Portmann continues the strain of biological speculation that came to a head in Bergson’s philosophy, which can be considered a polemic against Galileo’s division of the world into primary and secondary qualities. But there is a significant departure in Portmann, as in most modern biologists, from this mystical-aesthetical tradition. He emphatically rejects earlier notions of the primacy of the cell, both as science and political metaphor:

Comparing society with the “cell state,” many biologists found that individual cells were far more disciplined than individual men and played a far greater part in ensuring the welfare of the whole. Thus, what had been a biological oversimplification became a means of suppressing the freedom of the individual—the cell state became the dictator’s ideal.

The exciting new element in Portmann’s thinking for the layman is his tracing of the interaction of nucleus and cytoplasm, the sometimes equal importance of nucleoplasm and cytoplasm in determining structure and behavior. Not only the cell but the cell nucleus has been demoted. The brain itself as a directing mechanism shares in a general dispersion and decentralizing of interest from the cellular to the “apparative” state. What, Portmann asks, about the flatworm, Planaria, which, when cut in two, becomes two worms, each complete with a head and brain?

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I would suggest that Portmann’s book teaches a somewhat different lesson than the assault on mechanism that Mrs. Grene reads into it. He does, in his last chapter, have a go at various neo-Darwinian narrowings and hardenings of the master’s highly tentative theories. But essentially his temper is conciliatory and inclusive—for a very good reason. Neither physics nor biology needs any longer to lean on the increasingly sterile old opposition between mechanism and organicism. The fear of humanists that a purely mechanical view of natural process would eventually eliminate mystery altogether has proved to be wholly unfounded. The subject, from DNA on “up” to Portmann’s puzzles of self-expression and apparative autonomy, is saturated in mystery, so much so, indeed, that a close student cannot help switching rapidly back and forth between an organic and mechanistic philosophy of nature, finding equal comfort in both. It is virtually impossible to enter the field without keeping the two in some sort of complementary balance.

Portmann, to be sure, leans on Goethe, “a particularly keen explorer of all that is ‘destined to become manifest,’” but quickly adds that Goethe’s morphological-aesthetic aproach is “one of many possible paths that lead across a wide field.” If you mean to be aesthetic and explore with Portmann some features of form and color in birds, snakes, and snails that seem quite unrelated to selection or survival, you are not justified in drawing the line there, at the point where poetry and biology seem most obviously to walk together in fondness for the gratuitous. Many even more spectacular phenomena do contribute to survival. And many “indirect” and “unaddressed” phenomena visible only in microscopes or not visible at all stimulate the sense of beauty as much as do the others.

If all this remains stubbornly hidden to the layman, perhaps the appropriation of biology by the romantic movement and various of its more shady offshoots is chiefly responsible. For myself I. don’t know anything more likely to heal the artificial schism between romantic and classical ideas of nature than modern biology, equally dependent as it is on the rigors of classical physics from Galileo to the present and on every sympathy the poets can arouse.

R. W. Flint
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

If . . . Marjorie Grene and Adolph Portmann seek to challenge . . . the mechanistic tenets of Darwinism, it is fair to expect that their mastery of the principles they hope to challenge is thorough. . . .It was, therefore, with some astonishment, that I read Marjorie Grene’s example of the body of the sea snails as a pattern of body design which “. . . cannot conceivably serve a ‘useful’ purpose because they have no eyes.” Can it be that the writer is overlooking that most rudimentary of evolutionary principles, that display is not the only aspect of visual body pattern with survival value, but that protection from larger, predatory animals is another? In the latter case, the sea snails’ eyesight is irrelevant.

It will take better evidence than this to convince us “hard-headed evolutionists.”

Edith R. Silverman
Newton Center, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

With all due respect to Adolf Portmann, and Marjorie Grene’s estimation of his work, I fail to see what is “new” in his thesis.

It may be true that most biologists are still wedded to the view enunciated by Darwin over 100 years ago, namely, that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties” and that “the mental powers of higher animals do not differ in kind, though greatly in degree, from corresponding powers of man.” However, sociologists and anthropologists and social psychologists, particularly of the Symbolic-Interactionist school, have for some time questioned Darwin’s view and have gathered a significant body of data to support the exactly opposite view, viz., that man is fundamentally different from all other animals, including his closest zoological relatives, and that this difference may be summed up in man’s capacity to create, manipulate, and transmit abstract symbols. This capacity, in turn, is the basis of culture and language.

This view, although explicitly developed by contemporary anthropologists like Leslie Whyte, A. L. Kroeber, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Clyde Kluckhohn, was already advanced in Darwin’s time—albeit in a more rudimentary form—by Sir Edward Tylor.

Portmann’s ideas, then, while very important indeed, may by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as novel. And the fact that these ideas had to be painfully discovered anew, shows just how poor is the communication between practitioners of the biological sciences on the one hand, and practitioners of the social sciences on the other.

Irving M. Zeitlin
Department of Sociology
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

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To the Editor:

Marjorie Grene states “the concept of centricity may have far-reaching consequences for our thinking about nature, science, and ourselves.” Adolf Portmann’s article concludes with an allusion to the mystery of the origin of man. These statements appear related to the currently established Darwinian viewpoint which is helping destroy man’s faith in himself as a morally responsible and valuable person. Since man is not created for a purpose, but developed accidentally to no purpose, his moral ideas represent only the need for survival of an organism with a central nervous system built to invent useful stratagems.

Today, as never before, our fundamental ideas are seen to originate in a biological system, the brain. Yesterday, it was said that ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Today, in a sense, philosophy recapitulates biology. It is unfortunate that these ideas require a basic grasp of modern biology in order for them to be properly evaluated.

Certainly, readers of COMMENTARY are among those concerned with keeping alive the most humane of our traditional values. And the threats to these are both clear and present. But does a moral commitment demand an exhaustive effort to master the intricate mechanics of life? Isn’t there some easier method of deriving from the “science” of life those lessons that can teach man a philosophy that is compatible with his noblest traditions? . . .

(Dr.) Harold Koretz
Avoca, New York

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Mrs. Grene writes:

Like Mr. Flint, I regret the heavy existentialist overtones of “authentic” and “inauthentic,”—though I confess it didn’t occur to me that they would outweigh the soberer biological connotations of Portmann’s usage. “The adjectives actually used by Portmann are in fact, eigentlich and uneigentlich, literally authentic and inauthentic. “Direct” and “indirect” are neither Portmann’s terms, nor, in my opinion, do they render his meaning. He means, if I understand him, that what he calls “eigentliche Erscheinungen” are just that—genuinely appearing. The others are not “indirect,” but simply, qua appearances, not genuine: inauthentic.

Nor did I mean to read Portmann’s work as primarily “an assault on mechanism.” If my article has given that impression, this may arise partly from the cutting that was necessary to condense a lengthy chapter into article form. Within its fuller context, however, my emphasis on the non-Galilean tenor of Portmann’s thought is, I submit, fair, and important. The conceptual reform that is needed in order to assimilate all aspects of biology—and social science—to an adequate model of scientific knowledge is by no means completed. One still needs, therefore, to contrast Portmann’s ideas with those of more orthodox biologists and philosophers. If Mr. Flint doubts this, let him consult, for example, Morton Beckner’s Biological Way of Thought (Columbia, 1962), or any of Ernest Nagel’s articles on the philosophy of biology.

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Now as to Professor Zeitlin’s point: man, though a cultural animal, is still an animal, and to see, as Portmann does, his uniqueness as rooted in his biological uniqueness, is both significant and novel. Nor can the social sciences be given adequate philosophical foundation except through the mediation of a sound philosophical biology.

About the sea snails: this is Portmann’s example, and I presume that what he means is, not that there need necessarily be no function in the fact of color, but that—as in the case of the peacock’s fan—the particularity and rich abundance of colored pattern cannot easily be conceived as primarily or purely functional. I know that functionally minded biologists can, by some detour or other, read any character as “useful”; Portmann’s point is that we have here a vast array of visual data which are simply there. A biologist unfettered by Darwinian dogma can study them in, and for, their intrinsic value.