Structure in Science and Art ed. by Peter Medawar, Julian H. Shelley (review)

Leonardo. Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 316-333. 1982 Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readers are invited to recommend books to he reviewed. In ,general. on!,, hooks in English and in French can be reviewed at this stqe. THose who would like to be added to Leonardo‘spanel ofreviewers should write to the Editors. indicating their particular interests. Structurein Science and Art. Proceedings of the ThirdC. W. Boehringer Sohn Symposium, Kronberg, Taunus, 2-5 May 1979. Peter Medawar and Julian H. Shelley, eds. Excerpta Medica, Princeton, 1980. 175pp., illus. $39.00. ISBN: 0-444-90150-7. Reviewed by Rudolph Arnheim* The concept of structure is a happy choice for a comparison between science and art. Structure has definable properties that can be examined with more concreteness than is found in most discussions of the same subject. The symposium, held by 23 representative scholars of the sciences and humanities, was indeed remarkably substantial. During the four sessions the biologists and the physicists had the lion’s share, partly because they supplied half of the participants but also because they were willing to deal in some depth with the characteristics of structure itself, whereas the rest of the panel tended to remain ‘hung up’ on psychological controversies concerning the question: How is structure apprehended? Thus, Richard Gregory, a specialist of visual perception, reported on why he believes that perceptions are hypotheses. He suggested that percepts come about as intellectual interpretations, based on past experience, of physiological raw material, which is supplied by the senseof sight. Unfortunately, this sort of old-fashioned empiricism tells one nothing about the structureof percepts other than saying that it depends on what the viewer has learned to expect. A similar subjectivism is characteristic of information theory, which relies on expectation and surprise and which was rejected at the symposium by natural scientists and humanists alike as unfruitful for their work. Subjectivism emerged quite emphatically, however, in John A. Wheeler’s paper on quantum theory, with its insistence on ‘observer-participancy’ as the ‘absolutely central point’ of the quantum principle. This interpretation aroused the protest of the philosopher Karl Popper, who reminded the groupof Einstein’spersistent belief that ‘the world exists independently of the observer’. Structure as a field of forces constituting an organized whole IS characteristic of patterns in the material world of physics,chemistry and biology, as well as the psychological realm of percepts. Here significant questions on the relations between surface appearance and depth structure were brought up. Wheeler pointed out that in the history of science understanding runs ‘not from the surface symmetries to the inner machinery but from the inner machinery to the surface symmetries’, and the biologist Peter Medawar supplemented this statement by saying that a genetic code as an isolated entity does not exist: ‘There is no genotype without a phenotype.’ In keeping with the bold range of the discussion,the composer Gyorgy Ligeti gave examples of musical structures, such as 12-tone rows, that can be verified by analysis but cannot be heard. The spirit of D’Arcy Thompson, never absent from such debates, was summoned by the biologists, who pointed out that when Thompson showed that topological transformations reveal invariants of shape among quite different looking animals he may well have led the way to the realization that a variety of appearance may refer back to a common genetic agent. A purely mathematical regularity often indicates an underlying cause. In this connection, it is of considerable interest that one of the biologists, Manfred Eigen, was able to refer to recent findings according to which the spiral arrangement of leaves in certain plants corresponds to the Fibonacci numbers ‘as a consequence of the dynamics of growth, which involvesactivation and inhibition according to uniform chemical mechanisms’. Such an example reminds us that the discovery and application of simple mathematical ratios acquire true *I133 South Seventh Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, U.S.A significance only when the structural function of those ratios can be made explicit. How to Grow Science. Michael J. Moravcsik. Universe Books, New York, 1980. 240pp. $12.50. ISBN: 0-87663-344-0. Reviewed by Pierre Auger* Right at the beginning of his Preface the...