A Clockwork Embryo?

Abstract

In chapter 18 we noticed that Immanuel Kant had stumbled across an idea which belonged by rights to the nineteenth century. He believed that by a ‘daring venture of reason’ he could, perhaps, detect a mechanism — evolution, no less — through which the manifold forms of life originated. In the same chapter of the Critique of Judgment he insists, however, that such a hypothesis could never account for th development of an embryo. The ‘generatio aequivoca’, he wrote ‘by which is understood the production of an organised being through the mechanics of crude unorganised matter’, is an impossibility