Ecological Design and Education 299prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.Goethe proposed a kind of jailbreak from the prison of Cartesian anthropocentri-
cism and from beliefs that animals and natural systems were fit objects to be
manipulated at will. His intellectual heirs include all of those who believe that the
whole is more than the sum of its parts, including systems thinkers as diverse as
mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, politician and philoso-
pher, Jan Smuts, biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, economist, Kenneth Boulding,
and ecologist, Eugene Odum. Goethe’s approach continues in the study of non-lin-
ear systems in places like the Santa Fe Institute. Biologist, Brian Goodwin for one,
calls for a ‘science of qualities’ that complements and extends existing science (1994,
p198). Conventional science, in Goodwin’s view, is incapable of describing:
the rhythms and spatial patterns that emerge during the development of an organism
and result in the morphology and behavior that identify it as a member of a particular
species ... or the emergent qualities that are expressed in biological form are directly
linked to the nature of organisms as integrated wholes (1994, pp198–199).Goodwin, like Goethe, calls for a ‘new biology ... with a new vision of our rela-
tionships with organisms and with nature in general ... [one] that emphasizes the
wholeness, health, and quality of life that emerge from a deep respect for other
beings and their rights to full expression of their natures’ (1994, p232). Goodwin,
Goethe and other systems scientists aim for a more scientific science, predicated on
a rigour commensurate with the fullness of life in its lived context.
While Goethe’s scientific work focused on the morphology of plants and the
physics of light, D’Arcy Thompson, one of the most unusual polymaths of the
20th century and one who ‘stands as the most influential biologist ever left on the
fringes of legitimate science’ approached design by studying how and why certain
forms appeared in nature (Gleick, 1988, p199). Of his magnum opus On Growth
and Form (1917), Sir Peter Medawar said that it was ‘beyond comparison the finest
work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English
tongue’ (Gleik, 1988, p200). Thompson seems to have measured everything he
encountered, most notably natural forms and the structural features of plants, and
animals. In so doing he discovered the patterns by which form arises from physical
forces, not just by evolutionary tinkering as proposed by Darwin. Why, for exam-
ple, does the honeycomb of the bee consist of hexagonal chambers similar to soap
bubbles compressed between two glass plates? The answer Thompson discovered
was found in the response of materials to physical forces, applicable as well to ‘the
cornea of the human eye, dry lake beds, and polygons of tundra and ice’ (Willis,
1995, p72). Thompson challenged the Darwinian idea that heredity determined all
by showing the physical and mechanical forces behind life forms at all levels. His
work inspired subsequent work in biomechanics, evolutionary biology, architecture
and biomimicry, including that by Paul Grillo, Karl von Frisch and Steven Vogel.