Abstract

Peterson’s The Organic Life is a history of the development of the theoretical biology of organicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its focus on a group of polymaths who defined the organic philosophy against the status quo is still very much alive today as theorists debate the extent to which the dominant biological paradigm of mechanism, as advanced in the Modern Synthesis, is sufficient to all biological explanation. If science is to be empirical it cannot ignore the large body of evidence of what makes an organism an organism.