The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge: Understanding “Form” across Disciplines in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
The Circulation of Morphological Knowledge: Understanding “Form” across Disciplines in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
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形态学知识的流通：二十世纪和二十一世纪跨学科的“形式”理解
作者：
Marco Tamborini
本文将形态学这门科学学科的历史推向了一个更广泛的知识史和跨学科的知识史。它表明，通过研究知识和实践如何在科学学科（如生物学）和技术科学学科（如建筑和设计）之间循环，我们可以更好地理解（形态学）知识是如何产生的。通过这样做，分析有助于研究有机世界和技术世界之间的知识交流机制，更广泛地说，有助于研究知识流通的动态。首先，本文分析了奥匈帝国植物学家拉乌尔·海因里希·弗朗塞（1874-1943）和苏格兰博学家达西·温特沃斯·汤普森（1860-1948）对有机形态的工程学研究。随后，本文转向21世纪的形态发生。它探讨了形态空间的概念，数据可视化的古生物学实践，到生物学启发的建筑设计的转移。结论部分论述了知识转移和流通的广义特征。20世纪和21世纪世纪的形态学家成功地将自然界的形态发生过程转化为技术人工制品，以实现特定问题的技术解决方案。在将有机形态发生转化为技术过程的过程中，进化的内在历史偶然性被故意抛在后面。
This essay pushes the history of a scientific discipline, morphology, toward a broader philosophically informed and cross-disciplinarily engaged history of knowledge. It shows that by looking at how knowledge and practices circulated between scientific disciplines (such as biology) and technoscientific ones (like architecture and design) we can better understand how (morphological) knowledge was produced. By doing so, the analysis contributes to the study of the mechanisms of knowledge exchange between the organic and the technical worlds and, more broadly, to the study of the dynamics of knowledge circulation. First, the essay analyzes the engineering studies of organic form conducted by the Austro-Hungarian botanist Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–1943) and the Scottish polymath D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948). Subsequently, the essay moves to twenty-first-century morphogenesis. It examines the transfer of the notion of morphospace, a paleontological practice of data visualization, into biology-inspired architectural design. The conclusion deals with the broader features of knowledge transfer and circulation. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century morphologists successfully translate and transfer morphogenetic processes from nature into technical artifacts to achieve technical solutions to given problems. In the translation of organic morphogenesis into a technical process, evolution’s intrinsic historical contingency was deliberately left behind.