The Problem of Individuality: A Course of Four Lectures Delivered Before the University of London in October 1913

London: Macmillan & Co., 1914. First edition.

DRIESCH'S ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF HIS THEORY OF VITALISM--COPY OF EVOLUTIONIST WHO PROPOSED THE RED QUEEN HYPOTHESIS.

22x13.5 cm hardcover, red cloth binding, gilt title to spine, handstamp of Leigh van Valen to front paste-down, in signature of J. Y. Simpson to front free endpaper, i-ix, 84 pp, [4]. Light wear to corners, fading to spine and cover borders, mottling to endpapers, marginal pencil notations (presumably by van Valen). Very good minus in custom archival mylar cover.

Cited by Harmen and Dietrich: Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology: "On the embryological front, Driesch concluded that development occurred with such regularity, and in the case of the sea urchin proceeded toward an appointed end despite all sorts of introduced disturbances, that it must be guided by a teleological force that had no counterpart in the mechanical or physico-chemical world.'. This force he called entelechy, a term borrowed from Aristotle and referring to an "active principle of converting possibility into actuality. … Entelechy was thus not the blueprint of an organism's organization nor the creative agent that brings it about, but a kind of a mediator similar to a homeostatic governor, that protects the tendency system from being disrupted by extraneous factors (including embryologist's experiments). ... From the principle of teleology and its specific embryological form, entelechy, Driesch moved on to advocate an openly vitalistic philosophy of biology. It was first made manifest in Driesch's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Aberdeen in 1907-1908 and Published as The Science and Philosophy of the Organism in 1908. A distillation of these ideas published six years later as The Problem of Individuality (1914) will serve as the framework for explicating Driesch's line of argument in favor of vitalism. ... So influential had Driesch's ideas become in biological circles, however, that as late as 1942 the embryologist Joseph Needham felt compelled to insert a whole section (2.16) in his Biochemistry and Morphogenesis to attacking the doctrine of vitalism."

PROVENANCE: LEIGH VAN VALEN (1935 – 2010) was an American evolutionary biologist. Van Valen proposed the Red Queen hypothesis (1973), as an explanatory tangent to the Law of Extinction. The Red Queen Hypothesis captures the idea that there is a constant 'arms race' between co-evolving species. Its name is a reference to the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, in which the chess board moves such that Alice must continue running just to stay in the same place. He was also interested in fields outside biology, including measure theory, probability theory, logic, thermodynamics, epistemology and the philosophy of science.