Free The Flamingo’s Smile by Stephen Jay Gould

are worth recounting if only because few intellectual exercises can be more rewarding than an examination of how radically different systems of thought treat a common subject of mutual interest. I also believe that Serres was at least half wrong.
    Serres represented the great early nineteenth-century tradition of romantic biology, called Naturphilosophie (“nature philosophy”) in Germany and transcendental morphology in his native France. If modern morphologists study form either to determine evolutionary relationships or to discover adaptive significance by examining function and behavior, Serres and his colleagues pursued markedly different goals. They were obsessed with the idea that some overarching, transcendental law must underlie and regulate all the apparent diversity of life.
    These laws, in the Platonic tradition, must exist before any organism arises to obey their regularities. Organisms are accidental incarnations of the moment; the simple, regulating laws reflect timeless principles of universal order. Biology, as its primary task, must search for underlying patterns amidst the confusing diversity of life. In short, biologists must seek the “laws of form.”
    Serres contributed to the transcendental tradition by extending its concerns to embryology. Most of his colleagues had emphasized the static form of adults by searching for underlying patterns in final products alone. But organisms grow their own complexity from egg to adult. If laws of form regulate morphology, then we must discover principles for dynamic construction, not merely for relationships among finished creatures.

    A Siamese twin pair of conformation opposite to Ritta-Christina: one upper and two lower bodies. FROM SERRES , 1833.
    Serres’s monograph on Ritta-Christina begins with an abstruse 200-page dissertation on the principles of morphology and their application to embryology. Unless we sneak a peek at the alluring plates in the back (including the three figures reproduced with this essay), we hear nothing of the famous Sardinian twins until our senses are numbed by generality. This organization, in itself, reflects a style of science strikingly different from our own. We maintain an empirical perspective and like to argue that generalities arise from the careful study and collation of particulars. Any modern embryologist would discuss Ritta-Christina first and only venture some short and cautious conclusions at the end. But Serres, as a transcendentalist, believed that laws of form existed before the animals that obeyed them. If abstraction preceded actuality in nature, why not in human creativity as well? Thought and theory first, application later. (Neither extreme well represents the intricate interplay of fact and theory that regulates our actual practice of science. Still, I suspect that Serres’s “inverted” order is no worse a distortion of complex reality than our modern stylistic preferences.)
    In the first pages of his monograph, Serres tries to reduce the embryology of all animals to three basic laws of “organology.” First, by the law of eccentric development , known otherwise as the law of circumference to center, organs form initially at the edge of the developing embryo and then migrate toward the center. Second, by the law of symmetry , organs that become single and central in adults begin as double symmetrical rudiments on opposite edges of the developing embryo. Third, by the law of affinity , these symmetrical rudiments are drawn towards each other until they fuse in the center to form a single adult organ. (Let me be charitable and simply state that these laws are unwarranted extensions of patterns that operate occasionally in development. Serres was writing before the establishment of cell theory and just a few years after Karl Ernst von Baer’s discovery of the human ovum. His formal approach to morphology, so foreign to a world that can assess cellular and even molecular causes, fit the knowledge and mores