Titre : Reflections on Aristotle, D’Arcy Thompson and modularity in living beings 

Auteurs : Jean-Pierre Gasc,  

Revue : Art and Science 

Numéro : Special issue 

Volume : 6 

Date : 2022/02/3 

DOI : 10.21494/ISTE.OP.2022.0791 

ISSN : 2515-8767 

Résumé : In his essay, Georges Chapouthier reviews what caracterizes the living complexity in ordre to stimulate the creative imagination of artists in illustarting extraterrestrial beings. He use analogy with mosaic in which dissimilar units are put together to create esthetic set through their integration. Two main figures in the history of Biology, Aristotle and D’Arcy Thompson, are requestd for the definition of form. The first has played a basic role in understanding evolutive adaptations through his functionalist approach, but his teleological thought (finalism) was discarded by to-day evolutive biology. The second explained forms genesis through physical agents and he promoted their mathematical description, what turned out to be inventive in shape comparison and morphogenesis studies. However, remaining on the geometry and external forces ground, he missed the effects of biochemical and metabolic interactions, sources for internal energy. I find similar risks in Chapouthier’s approach. Mosaicity remains a geometrization, while the so universal modularity opened great evolutive opportunity. Reasoning by analogy provides at once and ambiguously heuristic capacity and weekness in generalizing. 

Éditeur : ISTE OpenScience