Biological diversity (BD) explored by biological systematics is a complex yet organized natural phenomenon and can be partitioned into several aspects, defined naturally with reference to various causal factors structuring biota. These BD aspects are studied by particular research programs based on specific taxonomic theories (TTs). They provide, in total, a framework for comprehending the structure of biological systematics and its multi-aspect relations to other fields of biology. General principles of individualizing BD aspects and construing TTs as quasi-axiomatics are briefly (...) considered. It is stressed that each TT is characterized by a specific combination of interrelated ontological and epistemological premises most adequate to the BD aspect a TT deals with. The following contemporary research programs in systematics are recognized and characterized in brief: phenetic, rational (with several subprograms), numerical, typological (with several subprograms), biosystematic, biomorphic, phylogenetic (with several subprograms), and evo-devo. From a scientific pluralism perspective, all of these research programs, if related to naturally defined particular BD aspects, are of the same biological and scientific significance. They elaborate “locally” natural classifications that can be united by a generalized faceted classification. (shrink)

It was commonly accepted in Goethe’s time that plants were equipped both to propagate themselves and to play a certain role in the natural economy as a result of God’s beneficent and providential design. Goethe’s identification of sexual propagation as the “summit of nature” in The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) might suggest that he, too, drew strongly from this theological-metaphysical tradition that had given rise to Christian Wolff’s science of teleology. Goethe, however, portrayed nature as inherently active and propagative, itself (...) improvising into the future by multiple means, with no extrinsically pre-ordained goal or fixed end-point. Rooted in the nature philosophy of his friend and mentor Herder, Goethe’s plants exhibit their own historically and environmentally conditioned drives and directionality in The Metamorphosis of Plants. In this paper I argue that conceiving of nature as active productivity—not merely a passive product—freed Goethe of the need to tie plants’ forms and functions to a divine system of ends, and allowed him to consider possibilities for plants, and for nature, beyond the walls of teleology. (shrink)

The paper presents analysis of form in different domains. It draws on the commonalities and their potential unified classifications based on how forms subjectively appear in perception—as opposed to their standard specification in Euclidean geometry or other objective quantitative methods. The paper provides an overview aiming to offer elements for thought for researchers in various fields.

To explain the amazing morphological and biomechanical analogy between two distantly related vertebrates as are a dolphin and a shark, an explanation exclusively framed in terms of adaptation (i.e., in terms of the Darwinian survival of the fittest) is far from satisfactory. The same is true, of course, of any other comparison between structurally similar, but phylogenetically unrelated organisms. A purely evolutionary argument does not throw any light on how the developmental processes of their ancestors could eventually evolve in such (...) a way as to eventually produce these peculiar phenotypes (the arrival of the fittest). How does Nature play with animal and plant form? To address the issue of the evolution of possible forms, we cannot ignore that these are products of development. This invites adopting the integrated perspective, currently known as evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo. Paths through the maze of living forms are not satisfactorily explained in terms of pure geometrical transformations or of the adaptive value of the phenotypes eventually produced. The emergence of form is largely dependent on the intrinsic evolvability of the developmental processes that translate the genotype into phenotypes. As a consequence, development makes analogous structures more likely to evolve than a pure adaptationist argument would ever suggest. (shrink)

El artículo reactualiza y defiende la potencialidad filosófica de La metamorfosis de las plantas, de Johann Wolfgang Goethe. A partir de la reflexión sobre sus claves conceptuales se desplegarán, a continuación, otros momentos de talante epistemológico relativos a su reflexión sobre la naturaleza, entre otros: la morfología como teoría de la forma, su comprensión de la ciencia como experiencia viva de los fenómenos y su reivindicación de la metamorfosis del científico.