Beer's Work Research Articles

Evolutionary developmental biology: its concepts and history with a focus on Russian and German contributions

Evolutionary theory has been likened to a "universal acid" (Dennett 1995) that eats its way into more and more areas of science. Recently, developmental biology has been infused by evolutionary concepts and perspectives, and a new field of research--evolutionary developmental biology--has been created and is often called EvoDevo for short. However, this is not the first attempt to make a synthesis between these two areas of biology. In contrast, beginning right after the publication of Darwin's Origin in 1859, Ernst Haeckel formulated his biogenetic law in 1872, famously stating that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Haeckel was in his turn influenced by pre-Darwinian thinkers such as Karl Ernst von Baer, who had noted that earlier developmental stages show similarities not seen in the adults. In this review, written for an audience of non-specialists, we first give an overview of the history of EvoDevo, especially the tradition emanating from Haeckel and other comparative embryologists and morphologists, which has often been neglected in discussions about the history of EvoDevo and evolutionary biology. Here we emphasize contributions from Russian and German scientists to compensate for the Anglo-American bias in the literature. In Germany, the direct influence of Ernst Haeckel was felt particularly in Jena, where he spent his entire career as a professor, and we give an overview of the "Jena school" of evolutionary morphology, with protagonists such as Oscar Hertwig, Ludwig Plate, and Victor Franz, who all developed ideas that we would nowadays think of as belonging to EvoDevo. Franz ideas about "biometabolic modi" are similar to those of a Russian comparative morphologist that visited Jena repeatedly, A. N. Sewertzoff, who made important contributions to what we now call heterochrony research--heterochrony meaning changes in the relative timing of developmental events. His student I. I. Schmalhausen became an important contributor to the synthetic theory of evolution in Russia and is only partly known outside of the Russian-reading world because only one of his many books was translated into English early on. He made many important contributions to evolutionary theory and we point out the important parallels between Schmalhausen's ideas (stabilizing selection, autonomization) and C. H. Waddington's (canalization, genetic assimilation). This is one of the many parallels that have contributed to an increased appreciation of the internationality of progress in evolutionary thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. A direct link between German and Russian evolutionary biology is provided by N. V. Timoféeff-Ressovsky, whose work on, e.g., fly genetics in Berlin is a crucial part of the history of evo-devo. To emphasize the international nature of heterochrony research as predecessor to the modern era of EvoDevo, we include Sir G. R. de Beer's work in the UK. This historical part is followed by a short review of the discovery and importance of homeobox genes and of some of the major concepts that form the core of modern EvoDevo, such as modularity, constraints, and evolutionary novelties. Major trends in contemporary EvoDevo are then outlined, such as increased use of genomics and molecular genetics, computational and bioinformatics approaches, ecological developmental biology (eco-devo), and phylogenetically informed comparative embryology. Based on our survey, we end the review with an outlook on future trends and important issues in EvoDevo.

Homology and heterochrony: the evolutionary embryologist Gavin Rylands de beer (1899–1972)

The evolutionary embryologist Gavin Rylands de Beer can be viewed as one of the forerunners of modern evolutionary developmental biology in that he posed crucial questions and proposed relevant answers about the causal relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. In his developmental approach to the phylogenetic phenomenon of homology, he emphasized that homology of morphological structures is to be identified neither with the sameness of the underlying developmental processes nor with the homology of the genes that are involved in the development of the structures. De Beer's work on developmental evolution focused on the notion of heterochrony, arguing that paedomorphosis increases morphological evolvability and is thereby an important mode of evolution that accounts for the origin of many taxa, including higher taxa.

Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amour and a Woman's Response by Jeanette Beer (review)

Reviews Jeanette beer, Beasts ofLove: Richardde Fournival's Bestiaire d'amouranda Woman's Response. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp x, 214. isbn: 0—80203612 —0. $50. Characteristic ofthe courtly culture ofthe thirteenth and fourteenth century was a love of complexity, of multiple allusions, of games, and of wordplay. Richard de Fournival's Bestiare d'amour typifies this passion for ambiguity and complexity. The Bestiaire is an elaborately self referential and rich work that provides a view of love as the ovetthrow ofreason by passion; a tale told through 'parole et painture.' Each 'beast' presents a different aspect oflove or passion, and is illustrated by illuminations of the wide variety of animals referenced. In recent yeats, much has been written about the uses of animals to represent the passions, vices, or other human characteristics, and theit role in revealing to us something about the medieval understanding of human psychology as well as the sexual mores of the era. The lavishly illuminated Bestiaire lends itself to this kind ofstudy. An evaluation ofthe work's reception by its audience is aided by the Response, a challenge presented to its misogynistic views from the pen ofa late thirteenth-century woman. Jeanette Beer, currently Professor of French at Purdue University, has written extensively on this ttadition, and has prepared translations ofboth the Bestiaire and The Response (1986; West Lafayette; 2000). The present work is a slim but densely argued explication ofthe Bestiary's position and ofthe critique found in the Response. The work is richly illustrated with fine teptoductions from the fourteenth-century manuscript, MS Douce 308. Beer's work is divided into six chapters, ofwhich the first four arc on the text of the Bestiaire. Chapter One, 'Love and Reason,' essentially discusses the well-worn theme ofthe sabotage ofreason by love. ChapterTwo, 'Love and the Senses,' evaluates Richard's lament on his role as victim, and Chapter Three discusses the presentation of possible remedies for Richard's plight. The most important remedy available to him is, very predictably, foresight, or prudence. Chapter Four, 'Love for Women,' stresses the metaphor of love as war, complete with pleas for mercy. The love of women, like warfare, cannot bring satisfaction to Richard. By Chapter Five, Beer has turned to an assessment of the Response. This short work is enigmatic, since neither the name of the author, nor even the date of the work are known. Beer speculates about these issues, describes the extant manuscripts, and finally summarizes its themes. In Chaptet Six, she discusses the legacy ofRichard's work in latet litetaty developments. While the scholarship is excellent within the very narrow scope the author has defined for herself, this work has several significant flaws. First, the genre of the ARTHURIANA 15.2(2005) 64 REVIEWS65 work, the bestiary itself, is a fascinating one, and Beer's expertise could have allowed much more discussion and evaluation of the gente as a whole. Where does the Bestiaire fit in to its tradition? Its rather shop worn views had an audience: who was it and why? What were its authot's sources? More development ofthe context ofthe work and discussion of its antecedents would have been useful and welcome. While these aspects may have been addressed in Beer's other wotks (she refers to them in notes), they are essential to her explication here, and their absence is notable and weakens both the utility and the interest of the work as a whole. Secondly, while 'parole et painture' is an important concept and the reproductions are very nicely handled by the publisher, rhere is no real explanation of analysis of the images. What is their context vis-à-vis the written text? Are all the 'beasts' illusttated? Are thete anomalies, exclusions, novel iconographies? A work so lavishly illuminated deserves to have its 'painture' taken as seriously as its 'parole,' in part, as art historian Robert Calkins has often pointed out, because the manuscript was intended to be experienced as a whole, senatum. The manuscript authot had it illuminated and went to considerable expense to do so. Why? What is the role of the images? What was the social and cultural role of the recipient? How and in what...

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Helen Small and Trudi Tate.LITERATURE, SCIENCE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, 1830-1970: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF GILLIAN BEER. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003

Reviewed by: Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer Nicholas Dames (bio) Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, edited by Helen Small and Trudi Tate; pp. vii + 255. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £53.00, $74.00. No small part of the intellectual pleasure afforded by a Festschrift is to see what part of the honoree's scholarship is now considered central by those who know it well. While Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis offers no large surprises to those who have profited from Gillian Beer's work, it does mark a small but potentially significant change of emphasis in the uses to which that work is put. As one might expect, questions of the potential alignment and nonalignment of literary and scientific knowledge are foregrounded here, and Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) is never far away from the minds of the contributors, as several essays here reconsider aspects of Darwin's career. But if the enduring interest of Darwin's [End Page 698] Plots was its analysis of the narrative structures that linked formally self-conscious Victorian fiction with evolutionary science, elsewhere in Beer's work we can find a complex interest in the mechanics of description, as in her important 1987 essay "Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery." The Beer presented to us by Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis is less a theorist of narrative than of nonnarrative questions of epistemology and language, of the ways in which literature and science grapple in productively overlapping ways with the dilemma of how to describe the world without letting the tools of description determine in advance the appearance and scope of that described world. The volume's opening essay, Nigel Leask's "Darwin's 'Second Sun': Alexander von Humboldt and the Genesis of The Voyage of the Beagle," strikes this note immediately. For Leask, the descriptive texture of the Voyage, particularly notable in its transformation from rough diary to published journal, is a careful reaction against the exoticism and vivacity of Humboldt's tropics. While the account here of the genesis of the proper tonal range of mid- Victorian professional science will be familiar to most readers, the detail with which Leask demonstrates the many points of contact and divergence between the descriptive practices of Humboldt and Darwin is thoroughly rewarding. As the volume advances, however, questions of description are raised even more explicitly, particularly in relation to the recurrent problem of category versus particular instance. Harriet Ritvo's "Ordering Creation, or Maybe Not," and Helen Small's "Chances Are: Henry Buckle, Thomas Hardy, and the Individual at Risk," each take interestingly nuanced approaches to the methodological dilemma that classification raised for Victorian scientists and novelists alike. Ritvo's essay restores critical attention to Victorian systematizers—still pervasively, and incorrectly, considered as dry redactors of Linnaean methods—by demonstrating the creativity, inventiveness, and polemical energy of nineteenth-century taxonomic theory. Her account of William MacLeay's little-known "quinary system" is a lucid, and appealingly unusual, case study in the ways in which post-Linnaean taxonomy had to find rather esoteric solutions to the problems presented by the enormous nineteenth-century influx of new organisms. Small's investigation of the impact of Henry Buckle's History of Civilisation in England (1857-61), an impact made all the more telling because of the frequency with which it was debunked and derided, makes fascinating claims for the importance of Buckle's deterministic, statistical method. For Small, Buckle's relatively unnuanced denigration of individual agency in favor of general contexts (nations, races, populations) helped many of his readers come to their own, more complex formulations of the relationship between the one and the many. When she turns to Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native (1878), Small makes the crucial move of studying the novel's discursive moments, particularly the descriptions of Egdon Heath, as reactions to the problem of particular instance versus determining context (or proximity versus grand overview) that Buckle so dramatically raised. As a way into the descriptive practices of Victorian fiction, still a rather unstudied realm, this seems promising and deserving of further investigation. Work like that of...

Brassens: Chansons by Sara Poole (review)

MLRy 99.2, 2004 503 not by reiterating previous commentaries but by exploring 'Foucault's own use of particular narrative styles and forms of language' often lost in the English transla? tions (p. 1). Dan Beer's short work is a series of incisive reflections on Foucault's 1976 study La Volonte de savoir, a study Beer believes to be one of the 'most fascinating works by any twentieth-century writer' (p. 16). Such a claim rests on the understand? ing of the complexity of language and the intricate way the narrative is constructed. This fact has not been appreciated, because previous examinations of the work have explored the ideas and meaning, rather than the 'form', of Foucault's narrative. Beer's work is not a systematic commentary, but rather a series of fiveshort inter? ventions into aspects of Foucault's study of sexuality, framing a set of questions or problems around a series of central themes, including ars erotica, confession, psychiatry /psychoanalysis, power, and the individual. In each chapter, Beer takes one of these themes and embellishes it with stylistic insight, historical illumination, and critical comment. He seeks to appreciate Foucault's language by recognizing the limits and awkwardness of Foucault's project, capturing the curiosity and fascination Foucault found in the tensions and limits of his own work (pp. 59, 75, 123-24). In Beer's study we appreciate how Foucault is a strategic writer as well as a strategic thinker. We are introduced to the subtleties of Foucault's text and discover his playfulness , parody, mimicry, satire, and rhetorical force. Beer not only shows the twists and turns within the idea of Thypothese repressive' (p. 31), but also demonstrates how Foucault captures the nature of confession by adopting a 'repetitive' style (p. 56) and how he mixes languages and vocabularies in examining 'le pouvoir' (pp. 80 ff.). Foucault is the master of tensions and inversions to the point of, as Beer notes, being self-consciously trapped inside the narrative, even to the point of 'self-cancellation' (PP-55,94)Beer 's work contains its own elliptical qualities in its representation of Foucault. While he rightlyappreciates the 'contorted layers of possibility' (p. 48) in Foucault's work, Beer's own 'allusions and undercurrents'?though illuminating?are limited in terms of the wider context of Foucault's writing. The selective focus of Beer's study is its success and failure. He does make useful, ifsomewhat limited, reference to other interviews and essays and draws in interesting secondary sources, such as Baudrillard and Eagleton, but a more systematic account would perhaps add more to the text. One instance of Beer's selective association can be found in the discussion of confes? sion, where he draws on Augustine, whom he regards as both 'particularly pertinent' and 'misleading' and an 'exception' (pp. 49-50). Foucault's work on Cassian and an appreciation not only of 'aveu' but also of 'exagoreusis' and 'exomologesis' would have added furtherappreciation of Foucault's disentangling of confessional practice. Beer also makes important acknowledgement of the idea of silence, which again is not limited to La Volontede savoir, but as Francois Ewald has indicated, and others have shown, is key to Foucault's work. Given the complexity and richness of Foucault's writing, as Beer appreciates, there will always be associations?particularly in a small book?that some will feel lacking, but to want more is Beer's sense of Foucault's 'compelling' narrative (p. 71). After Beer we can return to Foucault's texts with a new imagination and a new sensitivity to the force of his style. University of Stirling Jeremy Carrette Brassens: Chansons. By Sara Poole. London: Grant & Cutler. (Critical Guides to French Texts, 125) 2000. 94 pp. ?5-95- ISBN 0-7293-0424-8. In this firstbook-length study of Brassens in English Sara Poole provides a good introduction to his work and a useful starting point for the study of Brassens and 504 Reviews his place in chanson history. She devotes two chapters to major themes in Brassens's ceuvre and uses both close textual analysis and reference to wider critical sources, including articles and interviews, to explore critically the major themes. One...

The science of the unknowable: Stafford Beer's cybernetic informatics

This paper explores the history of Stafford Beer's work in management cybernetics, from his early conception and simulation of an adaptive automatic factory and associated experimentation in biological computing, through the development of the Viable System Model and the Team Syntegrity technique for discussion and planning. It also pursues Beer into the fields of micro‐ and macropolitics and spirituality. The aim is to show that all of Beer's projects can be understood as specific instantiations and workings out of a cybernetic ontology of unknowability and becoming: a stance that recognises that the world can always surprise us and that we can never dominate it through knowledge. The thrust of Beer's work was, thus, to construct systems that could adapt performatively to environments they could not fully control.

Implications for Beer's ontological system/metasystem dichotomy

Stafford Beer developed managerial cybernetics, but there were many facets of his work. Most of his work concerned epistemology, and little concerned ontology. Not all of the aspects or implications of his work has been fully recognised, and an attempt shall be made to explore one of these. In particular, this paper explores his paradigm by considering some of the epistemologically and ontological angles. Some of the implications for Beer's work will also be shown to have led to the creation of a virtual paradigm capable of exploring his achievements “externally”, after Godel.

Cybernetics, e-learning and the education system

This paper is based on the author's inaugural lecture, delivered on 22 May 2003. The paper is dedicated to the memory of two recently deceased thinkers: Ivan Illich and Stafford Beer. The paper first gives an overview of the contribution they made to illuminating the nature of institutions and their organisational structure, in particular, the education system. Learning technologies challenge accepted models of educational organisation. Developments since the 1970s are examined, identifying how the three strands of learning content development, computer mediated communication and learning management have become integrated in Learning Management Systems (LMS) made possible by the World Wide Web. It is argued that mainstream LMS offer restricted pedagogic opportunities if they are adapted to existing organisational forms, instead of being used to relax organisational constraints. Beer's work provides us with tools for the redesign of educational systems to obtain most benefit from new technologies, guided by Illich's critique of formal education.

Cognitive Revolution in Management

A Cognitive Revolution in Management (CRM) has been brought about through Stafford Beer's work in management cybernetics. Explains the philosophical undertone of CRM as well as cybernetic features associated with it. The work on varietal aspects of management systems by Ansoff has also contributed to CRM, which needs to be backed by a cognitive information system, and a Cybernetic Theory of Management.

The Viable System Model

The contributions to this issue of Systems Practice have in common their focus on Beer's Viable System Model (VSM). However, they are not intended to be a tribute to Beer's work. His work goes far beyond the VSM and it would require a much wider set of contributions to do justice to it. In fact, my main purpose in putting this issue together has been to make more apparent the kind of knowledge that any person can gain about organizations by understanding and making use of the VSM. Its holistic epistemology is becoming more relevant in a world where people are becoming more aware, unfortunately, most of the time the hard way, about the high interconnectivity of all kinds of social and natural phenomena. People need more powerful tools to think about these phenomena. These should enable them to recognize connectivity and understand the possible reverberations of their actions. The point is that however much a person may wish to develop a holistic view of a situation his success will depend on the tools for thought he uses in the endeavor. If the tools are reductionist the outcome may well be a very authoritative but largely unrelated set of views about the situation. On the other hand, if the tools are systemic but too complicated, they are going to be of limited practical use; the person's limited information processing capacity will be overwhelmed by them. In this spectrum the VSM is a powerful tool to cope effectively with complexity. It makes the matching between the high complexity emerging from the activities of the many people involved in an organization and the relatively low complexity of any one person, or group, more effective. This increased effectiveness, at the level of individuals, may well be what is necessary to overcome their alienation or frustration, thus enhancing the chances for their effective contribution to the overall organization. But for this to be the case it is not enough to have a few people with

Management and self-management: the objective-subjective dimensions

A distinction is made between the way the Law of Requisite Variety applies to systems involving human beings and systems that do not. It is claimed that a proper interpretation of the Law for human systems involves the use of auxiliary concepts, some of which have yet to be clarified. The auxiliary concepts are implicit in the theoretical work of Beer and his associates, but become explicit in practice. Two of these concepts are agreement and participation , which are almost always tacit rather than explicit. Human systems are only viable when they involve agreement and participation, and this is not accidental but tied to the nature of variety itself. It is argued that the full development and exploration of these concepts (and others allied to them) will foreshadow a new paradigm for management science, the material basis for which now exists in current computing technology.

Irish smuggling in the eighteenth century

Since the work of Beer, or at least since the studies of Andrews and Harper, no serious historian has failed to recognize that the British mercantile system did not bear too heavily upon the American colonies before 1763. In the first place, some regulations either directly and intentionally, or indirectly and unintentionally, fostered colonial development. In the second place, enforcement was often so lax and evasion so common that a number of regulations Lvere practically inoperative. Yet though the beneficent effects of ‘salutary neglect’ upon the American colonies have long been accepted, writers on Irish history have continued to assume that the mercantile system was applied to Ireland with devastating effectiveness. Was this indeed true? Or was British mercantilism in Ireland mitigated in the same ways as in the overseas colonies —by compensating advantages and by evasion? The present article concerns itself only with the latter point, the question of enforcement and evasion of British restrictions on Irish trade.

The ultraviolet absorption spectrum of dicyanoacetylene

The ultraviolet absorption spectrum of dicyanoacetylene, NC-CC-CN, is reported for the first time. It was measured in solution, and in the vapor at both low and high resolution. There are two band systems: Wavelength ϵ max in isooctane ƒ Vibrational structure Postulated transition 1 2800 Å 8·4 ~2 × 10 −5 Numerous sharp bands about 20 cm −1apart 1Σ g + → 1Σ − u 2 2680 Å 171 ~4 × 10 −3 Four groups of six bands each, plus other weaker bands 1Σ g + → 1 Δ u A vibrational analysis of the 2680 Å system is given which shows quite convincingly that the transition, which is electronically forbidden, is made vibrationally allowed by π g vibrations. This is compatible with either 1Σ u − or 1Δ u symmetry for the upper state. The analogy to Beer's work on the polyacetylenes suggests strongly that the transition is 1Σ g + → 1Σ u , and that 1Σ u − is the upper state for the other band system at 2800 Å.