Bohm’s Metaphysics and Biology

Abstract

This paper was written in response to discussions at the second of C. H. Waddington’s symposia on Theoretical Biology (1967), which I had the pleasure of attending. The uniqueness of the occasion, for me, lay in the opportunity to hear David Bohm present his ontological views — in effect, a transposition into a modern coordinate system of Spinozistic metaphysics. I would by now be inclined to separate more sharply than I did then the scope and conceptual structure of evolutionary theory from the general metaphysical framework in which it may — and perhaps ought to be — imbedded.