ABSTRACT
The history and philosophy of science over the latter half of the last century has been commonly presented as a contest between two principal schools of thought on what the ultimate purpose of science is or should be about, and what scientists should be searching for in their respective disciplines. Writing just a few years after the publication of Bertalanffy's foundational paper, Michael Polanyi, an early critic of the neo-Darwinist fixation on natural selection and the biological mechanisms of genetic heredity, proffered his own insights into the orderly workings of living systems. Since Polanyi and Gould anticipated the evolutionary significance of emergence, interest in the subject across disciplines has steadily grown, from physics and the biological and cognitive sciences to the emergence of human language. Central to their theory is a biological conception of cognition as a circular, self-referential process, the sole purpose of which is to sustain the individual identity and development of the organism.
