Professor Leemon McHenry
Visiting Research Fellow, September - November 2024
Home institution: California State University, Northridge
I have worked mainly in metaphysics and philosophy of science in my academic career, and for the past twenty years I have been a research consultant in medical ethics for a Los Angeles based law firm. My most recent books are The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine, co-authored with Dr. Jon Jureidini, (Wakefield Press, 2020).
Project title: C. H. Waddington’s Theoretical Biology
The general purpose of this research proposal is to explore C. H. Waddington’s theoretical biology as part of an interdisciplinary team of scientists and philosophers based in Edinburgh, the Living Organisms and their Choices Project.
IASH co-founder, C. H. Waddington, was a polymath of wide learning who made important contributions to the advance of science and wrote with a general understanding of philosophical issues. He was the founder of epigenetics and proposed a model of genetic assimilation to compete with the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection.
Purpose in nature was banished from scientific orthodoxy with the rise of seventeenth century cosmology, including animal behavior. The mechanism vs. vitalism controversy that drew Waddington’s attention at the beginning of the 20thcentury is still very much alive in contemporary speculative biology, for example, in the orthodox view of the Modern Synthesis which views living organisms as machines. As for the question―Can living things be treated as if they are nothing but mechanisms constructed of mere material components? ―Waddington argued that living things cannot be accounted for in concepts that were formulated for the non-living world.
Organicism is a third option from viewing the universe under the ancient dichotomy of mind and matter. Biology and physics must be unified into a view that explains the evolution of life and consciousness from a very rudimentary form of sentience. The idea that nature is alive, creative and purposeful is very much the essence of Alfred North Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.” Waddington found in Whitehead’s metaphysics the power of generalization that provided a theoretical framework and informed the direction of his scientific research on the development and evolution of organisms. Both Whitehead and Waddington’s views suggest a revolutionary change of paradigm in theoretical biology.
2017 Fellowship
Project title: The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine
The scientific foundation of medicine, evidence-based medicine, is corrupted by the profit motive of the pharmaceutical industry. Without disinterested, independent bodies that design, conduct and report the testing of medicine for efficacy and safety, evidenced-based medicine is an illusion. I argue that Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, falsificationism, provides the framework and guiding principles for restoring the integrity of the system.