ABSTRACT
This chapter leads inexorably to the familiar proposition that life is process and transformation. The areas of biology that continue to defy a Cartesian reductionist analysis include brain function, embryonic development, and the evolutionary origins of the major taxonomic groups of organisms. Although this may appear to take us on an excursion away from the focus of our enquiry into organisms and minds, it is necessary to clear the biological ground of certain conceptual obstacles. The limitations of the dualities discussed above arise from the attempt to explain stability in terms of something static and stable, rather than something dynamic. This view of organisms leads to numerous contradictions and difficulties because of the endless proliferation of dualisms that arise from any attempt to analyse process in static terms. The current dialectic of the animal-human interface in biology leads to one of those startling changes of cultural viewpoint that brings self-generating power back into fundamental reality and banishes mechanism.
