Isomorphology
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Isomorphology |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Gemma Anderson |
| Keywords | morphology, symmetry, drawing, classification, taxonomy |
| Published | 2012 |
| No. of pages | 21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Isomorphology is the study of the shared forms of animal, mineral and vegetable forms (morphology) through drawing. Scientists study morphology within the distinct kingdoms of animal, mineral and vegetable, but there is no holistic study of the morphology that connects the three. I have identified 16 geometric forms (these are mathematical forms, some of which are symmetries) that can be found in animal, mineral and vegetable species, which I will describe in this manifesto. Isomorphotogy is a study, which has developed after years of observational and intellectual enquiry. Through drawing, Isomorphology interprets the mathematical, the animal, the mineral and the vegetable holistically, as interdependent: Drawing the natural language to all.
Overview
Isomorphology; A Manifesto is not a research paper in the ordinary sense but an artist's statement of method, presented as a facsimile sketchbook. Roughly a quarter of its twenty-one pages carry typed prose; the remainder are reproductions of Anderson's own handwritten and drawn working pages, in which specimens from the three classical kingdoms are set beside one another on the sheet so that their common geometry becomes visible. The word is built from its parts on the opening page: "Iso- Same/Shared, Morph- Form, Ology- Study of".
The claim is a claim about classification rather than about physics. Scientists, Anderson writes, "study morphology within the distinct kingdoms of animal, mineral and vegetable, but there is no holistic study of the morphology that connects the three". Isomorphology proposes to supply one, not by unifying the kingdoms taxonomically but by identifying a small set of geometric forms and symmetries that recur across all three, and by using drawing — not measurement, not molecular analysis — as the instrument by which the recurrence is found and recorded. Anderson describes the study as one "which has developed after years of observational and intellectual enquiry", and closes with the proposal that it be taken up as an educational model.
The argument
Is Isomorphology scientific?
Anderson answers her own question directly and in the negative: "Isomorphology is not a science, a theory or a belief system, it is a creative study." Having said so, she immediately qualifies the disclaimer, warning the reader "not to underestimate" the research on which it leans, "which indicates that a holistic study of forms and symmetries inclusive of animal, mineral and vegetable species has both scientific value and meaning".
The scientific anchor she names is Antonio Lima-de-Faria, Professor Emeritus at Lund University, and specifically his work on what he calls the atomic periodicity of animal, mineral and vegetable species (The Atomic Origin of Structural Periodicity, World Scientific, 1995). She quotes his position that "there are no accidental or analogous processes but only homologous phenomena", and his claim that periodicity provides an explanation for "the recurrence of a given pattern in completely different families or even in different phyla". His standing example, which she reproduces, is the five-radial symmetry of petals in flowers belonging to quite different plant families and its re-emergence in the starfish. She notes that Lima-de-Faria has proposed a mechanism of evolution grounded in a rigid internal atomic organisation rather than in selection among accidents. The manifesto opens with his question: "Ever look at the swirls of frost on a window pane and discover similar patterns in the curled shoots of a fern? Or maybe wonder why an insect is leaf-shaped? Or why brain coral and the human brain look alike?"
Isomorphology as an approach to classification
The middle typed section is the manifesto's most reflective. Anderson asks why she wanted an alternative model of understanding and classifying the natural world at all, and answers by listing what she takes scientific taxonomy not to be: "not founded on analogical thinking; it is not instinctive, not holistically comparative across kingdoms, not imaginative, not artistically creative."
The move she then makes is deliberately careful. Isomorphology "is 'not' the scientific model, but it does share an important method, the close observation of specimens". She refuses to say whether it is discovered or invented — "it is not clear if it is discovered or invented" — and characterises it instead as "the opening of the 'not' of scientific taxonomy, a liberation of form, a way of understanding the world and relativizing abstraction; effected through the artist's trained judgment in observing morphologies and identifying pattern". The claim to authority, in other words, is placed on trained perception rather than on measurement or theory.
The sixteen conventions
The set of forms itself is presented as a hand-annotated table, drawn over and partly obscured in the reproduction, so that only fragments survive legibly in the archived scan. What can be read includes bilateral symmetry with its mirror axis, radial symmetry, spiral forms, and a note on sevenfold symmetry keyed to the seven-sided British fifty-pence piece. Beside each entry Anderson has written specimens drawn from across the kingdoms — human, gypsum, trilobite, orchid, honeysuckle, pea, banana, apatite, animal horns — so that a single geometric heading gathers a mineral, a plant and an animal on one line. She also records methodological decisions: some structures "will be considered without" their subsidiary detail (the wing of a bee is her example), and flowers are to be taken without particular counts of petals, so that the classification tracks form rather than enumeration.
The list is described in the abstract as fifteen forms and, in the closing section, as "the 16 conventions of Isomorphology"; the manifesto's own text does not reconcile the two counts.
Reflections on the possibilities
The final typed passage returns from the table to the garden. "After marking the 16 conventions of Isomorphology, I went for a walk in my garden to observe the forms and symmetries in the plant life around me. I began to see bilateral leaves, branches, bilateral leaves on branches, and pondered the possible combinations of the forms and symmetries." What she values in the exercise is that it yields something "meaningful (other than beauty and wonder) from direct observations", and that the study "has become an outlook … joyfully developed through the combination of observation and intellect, empirical and abstract at once".
From this she proposes Isomorphology as an educational model, "through which a student can learn, through drawing, about the mathematical, the animal, the mineral and the vegetable simultaneously" — and, she stresses, a study a student can develop independently in their own garden.
Assessment
Taken as what it declares itself to be — a creative study rather than a theory — the manifesto is coherent and unusually candid about its own epistemic status. Anderson does not claim that shared form implies shared cause, does not offer a mechanism, and refuses even to decide whether her categories are found or made. That refusal is a strength rather than an evasion: it keeps the project from the standard failure mode of pattern-hunting across domains, which is to treat visual resemblance as evidence of physical relationship. The insistence on drawing as method also has a serious defence behind it, since sustained observational drawing is a genuine discipline of attention and has a long history in natural history illustration; the manifesto's claim that it shares "the close observation of specimens" with science is fair.
The difficulties begin where the manifesto leans on Lima-de-Faria. His thesis that "there are no accidental or analogous processes but only homologous phenomena" is a strong empirical claim about evolution, and Anderson adopts it as her warrant that a cross-kingdom morphology "has both scientific value and meaning" without examining it. That thesis is squarely at odds with the very large body of measured cases of convergent evolution — the independent origin of the camera eye in vertebrates and cephalopods, with different embryonic tissue and inverted retinal geometry, is the standard example — where similar form demonstrably arises from unrelated developmental routes. Nor does the manifesto engage the well-developed physical accounts of recurrent natural form, from D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form onward, in which shared geometry across kingdoms follows from shared constraints of surface tension, packing and growth rate rather than from atomic periodicity. Since those accounts would supply exactly the "scientific value and meaning" Anderson wants, and would do so without Lima-de-Faria's contested mechanism, their absence weakens rather than protects the project.
The internal problems are smaller but real. The count of forms is fifteen in one place and sixteen in another, and the list itself is not legible in the archived document, so the manifesto's central content — the actual taxonomy of shared forms — cannot be read off the paper. The criteria by which a form qualifies are never stated: nothing explains why bilateral symmetry and sevenfold symmetry are conventions of the same kind, or why the wings of a bee should be abstracted from while other structures are not. Without such criteria the classification rests wholly on the "artist's trained judgment" that Anderson names, which is a defensible foundation for an artistic practice and an insufficient one for a system others are meant to apply. The educational proposal at the close — a student learning mathematics, biology, mineralogy and botany at once through drawing in a garden — is the manifesto's most attractive idea, and the one that depends least on any of the contested claims.