Customer Reviews

Thinking Beyond Darwin: The Idea of the Type As a Key to Vertebrate Evolution (Renewal in Science)

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Ernst Michael Kranich has written an interesting book on the possibility of evolution without necessarily having to be of the Darwinian type. Even though his work is predated in the main by Wolfgang Schad (Man and Mammals) who also provides a far deeper analysis, it does add some new aspects to Goethean science.

Goeathen science or in other words the way of science developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (the famous German poet) is different in the sense that it stays with the phenomenon rather than going outside of it. Goethe stresses this by statements such as "the phenomenon is already theory" using the Greek meaning of theory rather than the modern meaning which almost dissociates itself from the phenomenon under question. As such this approach is purely objective in the true sense of scientific, to get an idea of the full aspects of such a science in a very clear and methodical way devoid of speculation read the book by Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature, which can expand on this idea.

Kranich uses the Goethean approach to look carefully at the animal world and its developments such as horses skeletons and the organ arrangement in mammals, the important aspect is that he brings out the wholeness of the animal in question rather than an analysis of each part. The animal is seen whole rather than constructed of parts. For example does the word arm or hand having any meaning when abstracted from the body it is connected to, and so too for the organs and structure of the animal. This approach of Kranich is both satisfactory in a very human way and yet does not sacrifice scientific rigour.

Given the comments above I must note that not all of the book was as well written as I would have liked, its possible the translation from the German was not the best perhaps because of the concepts used in German which may have had untranslatable aspects. But I also felt that at times the science was on shaky ground never feeling quite secure in Kranich's argument and always feeling that either there was more to do to make one really believe it or that the opposing arguments from accepted science could not be fully dealt with.

Nonetheless a satisfying book and a good lead into Goethean approaches to science.

This book proposes a view of evolution based on the fossil evidence, but which reaches different conclusions than the official view of gradual change through random mutations. The author concentrates specifically on the vertebrates, and argues that in the progression from simpler to more complex(fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal)animals there is a total reorganization of organic functioning,making it unlikely that random mutations could generate changes concurrently enough to be viable. Instead he develops a line of reasoning which attempts to show that organisms develop according to an inner direction , or their "inner lawfulness" rather than totally through the influence of their environment. This difference in viewpoint has large philosophical implications because it suggests that the different forms of life are not simply accidents or contingencies, but point to some directed impulse in nature whereby certain inherent patterns may be called forth by external stimuli. It seemed that in the first part of the book the author was almost diffident about revealing the main thrust of his concepts,as though they might be too unorthodox for comprehension. But after this initial reticence, I felt he did a quite adequate job of explaining them. Overall I found it to be a stimulating read although a little murky in places, and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in these matters.

If you think that only those with religious motivations find current evolutionary theories inadequate, this book is for you. These German scholars demonstrate that gradual accumulations of mutations does not add up to biological novelty. The abrupt appearance of fossils in the fossil record, as noted by the German paleontologist Otto Schindewolf decades ago, is also recounted. The work of Michael Denton is also mentioned.