"Brian should be described as a theoretical biologist. He was introduced into biology from early days, but more recently he has had a structuralist perspective, reaching for fundamental patterns on some expression of life. In that sense, he has come in with a new message, into a biology that's more or less fixated on components and molecules."
- Francisco Varela

"The 'new' biology is biology in the form of an exact science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order. Then everything in biology changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition, selfish genes, climbing peaks in fitness landscapes, what you get is evolution as a dance. It has no goal. As Stephen Jay Gould says, it has no purpose, no progress, no sense of direction. It's a dance through morphospace, the space of the forms of organisms."

BRIAN GOODWIN Brian Goodwin is a professor of biology at the Schumacher College, Milton Keynes, and the author of Temporal Organization in Cells and Analytical Physiology, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity; (with Gerry Webster) Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology; and (with Richard Sole) Signs if Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology.

Dr. Goodwin is a member of the Board of Directors of the Sante Fe Institute.

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