Bio-determinists consider that we are not free since our lives are largely determined by a small amount of inner causes, among which our genes, for specific behaviors or the predisposition to such behaviors. But such a vision, in the long run, denies the difference between human biology and that of other organisms.
Our brains, our hands and our tongues have made us independent of the single fundamental characteristics of the outer world. Our biology has made us creatures who constantly recreate their own psychic and material environments, and whose lives are the result of an extraordinary multiplicity of intersecting causal paths. So it is the specificity of our biology that makes us free and, as a result, ethically responsible. As the anthropologist and epistemologist Gregory Bateson tells us, our mind possesses, and constantly regenerates, its own ecology.
Thus we gradually perceive with greater clarity the network of subtle interactions between the psycho-biological environment inside man and the entire outer ecosystem where our species is placed. This inter-correlation has been aptly described by the philosopher and scientist Fritjof Capra in his latest book, containing a vast synthesis, and precisely titled The Web of Life (October 1996). Here Capra tells the history of the arising, in very recent days, of a new scientific language that is progressively being developed in order to describe the complexity of all living systems, that is of organisms, social systems and ecosystems.
Historically the complexity of nature had been analyzed in Western philosophy and science from two different, opposite points of view. Putting it simply, Capra claims that the Greek philosophers distinguished these two approaches as being the study of substance and the study of form.
By the word substance, they meant what today we would call matter, structure or quantity. The word form indicated what today we would classify as pattern, order or, better said. quality. Two epistemological visions that are constantly competing to answer different questions. The question asked by whoever studies substance is: what is something made of, what are its components? The approach of whoever studies form replies to the question: what is its pattern, its model, its overall design?
Such questions went through a long eclipse in the history of modern science until, during this century, during the twenties they necessarily returned. Actually scholars who dealt with the theory of systems recognized that to be able to understand living systems the study of form was essential.
There were three sectors where that kind of thinking developed, practically at the same time: organic biology, Gestalt psychology and ecology. All being fields where scientists had to study living systems as integrated groups that could not be reduced, without losing meaning, to smaller sub-systems. Living systems, in this sense, include single individuals, parts of organisms.
The theory of systems, elaborated in the forties by Ludwig von Bertanlaffy, is thus necessarily an interdisciplinary approach, or better said, transdisciplinary. In his holistic approach, the Austrian biologist introduces the concept of the open system as being typical of the biological realm. That kind of system has to be continually fed by a flow of energy and matter stemming from the surrounding environment. These open systems are self-supporting in a state of balance that is far from equilibrium. Bertanlaffy defines it as Fleissgleihgewich, flying balance. These systems cannot be defined in terms of classical thermodynamics, and he postulated a new kind of thermodynamics that describes them. The problem was solved thirty years later by the Nobel prize-winner Ilya Progogine, using the new mathematics of complexity.
So the first necessary epistemological transformation that occurred implied moving from the perspective of parts to that of the whole: the second that followed was changing the angle of the study, transferring the interest from objects to relationships. Understanding relationships is not conceptually easy in our traditional way of thinking, where what is studied in science always has to be able to be measured and weighed.
On the contrary, relationships do not have dimensions that are not symbolic, and certainly do not have physical weight. However, relationships can be mapped out. When this happens, we discover that certain configurations appear that occur recurrently. So patterns are configurations of relationships that appear continuously, and the study of relationships thus leads to the study of patterns. This methodological transition leads us towards a new way of conceiving biology, which from now on can be clearly described, and which proposes to analyze ecosystems from an original point of view. In a certain sense, this biology has to recapture certain holistic aspects of Renaissance scientific thought, where art and science, matter and form, are constantly combined in practical intuitions and in the lives of the protagonists of the times. The embriologist Brian Goodwin, in his recent book The Evolution of Complexity, argues that biology, in order to accomplish its tasks adequately, must increasingly become a science of quality and not just of quantity. This way of thinking, increasingly shared by evolutionist biologists and theorists of artificial life, rallying around the memory of the English geneticist D.H. Waddington’s vision, is confirmed by scholars from other disciplines who adhere to the trend that is by now well defined as the thought of complexity. The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is one of the centers of this ideal network of the thought of eco-complexity, a science that precisely chooses to be called a science of qualities. n biology we can safely claim that every vital phenomenon is non-linear, so a widespread interest has arisen among biologists for all the theories that attempt to analyze non-linear phenomena.
To be able to describe a phenomenon as not being linear, four common features have been identified. All of these systems are open systems, far from equilibrium; they describe the spontaneous springing up of new structures and new forms of behavior - this phenomenon being classified as auto-organization or autopoiesis in the definition given by Maturana and Varela; they imply internal retro-actions or auto-corrective mechanisms; they are formulated in terms of non-linear equations. Gradually at the end of this century there seems to be appearing a new way of thinking which combines the various disciplines, all of which, in different ways, are related to eco-complexity. Fascinating new horizons of speculations and applications are opening up.
But I would not want my vision of this perspective to be overly optimistic. The reductionist approach still predominates in biology for instance. The powerful paradigm of molecular biology fascinates scholars and students. Bio-technologies continue to promise a vaster palingenesis than they will be able to achieve for providing concrete contributions to resolve life’s problems.
The evolutionist and philosopher of science Richard Lewontin reminds us that from Darwin on we have gone from environmental determinism to genetic reductionism, based on the selfsame separation between individual and environment, between inside and outside. A separation to which Lewontin opposes his interactive conception, in which organisms produce their environment, and genes, in this context, are only some of the elements constituting an organism’s biological individuality.
In his book Biology as ideology: the DNA doctrine, Lewontin re-evaluates the cultural and political factors belonging to human social life, thus contradicting the environmentalist myth of an outer environment that should be saved without questioning the social structures that compromised it.
Such claims set off countless alarms, so it is with great interest that I am striving to understand how agro-industrial policies are being conceived and planified in the perspective of eco-complexity.
I read in the scientific press, for instance, that the Vavilov Institute in St.Petersburg, the extraordinary safe containing 330.000 varieties of plants belonging to 2,500 food species which are or could be useful to feed mankind, is about to close owing to a financial and structural crisis. In 1956 the Institute was named after its prestigious founder whom Lysenko had thrown out, with several of his collaborators, at the end of the thirties. Vavilov ended up in prison, where he died in 1943. The closing of the Vavilov would cause the disappearance of a priceless source of genetic variability for all mankind, but it looks like little is being done on the international level to save it.
To many of us, genetic selection in agriculture appears increasingly to be a double-edged weapon, since if on the one hand it enables to increase production and feed ever-greater numbers of individuals, on the other hand it reduces the genetic variability essential to the networks of life.
It alters the global complexity constituting the very essence of those interactive mechanisms allowing many species to continue to exist on our planet. For instance, the Vavilov Institute preserves at least 14,000 species of oats alone, and it is from one of these species that is particularly drought-resistant, saved precisely in case of a sudden need, that Eritrea was saved when it was struck seven years ago with an exceptional drought.
Recently the FAO communicated that throughout the world there are around a half a million species, only half of which have been identified. Among them thirty thousand are edible, but actually only 30 are used to feed humanity. Wheat and corn represent half of the food absorbed by the population of our planet. Uniformity of species represents a great danger.
Modern agriculture uses too few species and too intensively. The results obtained with genetic improvements have been excellent, but in 2025, when we expect a population of 8 milliard, they will not be sufficient to feed it, if a high level of genetic variability is not preserved. Actually the anthropic systems themselves, meaning those created by man, are the ones offering the lowest values of biological diversity.
The case of rice is exemplary: out of the nearly ten thousand varieties present in 1949, in 1970 only one thousand were left. Presently 552 million tons of rice are produced, grown over an area of 150 million hectares, but the entire genetic material derives from only two species of rice.
It is claimed that genetic engineering in agriculture will be the way to rid the new plant varieties of chemicals, making them ecologically safe, but it all appears to be in obvious contradiction with the basic principles of eco-complexity. The contrast between these two different approaches, meaning that of monoculture and that of the diversity of the eco-system, was aptly described by Vandana Shiva in his book Monoculture of the Mind: Bio-diversity, bio-technology and “scientific” agriculture.
The author claims that the monocultural way of thinking arises from the reductionist science of quantities, that views species in terms of specific features that can be maximized to produce more of a certain product. So we wonder, with growing anxiety, how far the new visions of eco-complexity have actually influenced those who deal with agro-industrial production. The traditional use of natural products is in fact a use integrating a variety of products in a balanced and viable whole, that is intrinsically robust owing to the number of its interacting components, a system rich in biological quality. Economic parameters and biological parameters may not necessarily blend in a fruitful synthesis. Emmanuel Kant reminds us that organisms are intentional agents committed to expressing their nature, possessing a qualitative perfection that does not require external complements.
Recognizing and appreciating animal and plant species as forms of life springing from a dynamic process, situated on the fragile threshold of processes of chaos, ought to lead us to envisage our relationship with them as a delicate, intricate network of inter-dependencies, of eco-complexities, inside the human mind too, allowing the life of our species on Earth.

Bruno D’Udine