Spencer Heath Archive

Item 858

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

December 5, 1955

/SYNTHESIZING THE SCIENCES:

BRIDGING THREE WORLDS/

Professor Clough /Columbia University/ commented upon the great effort that is being made nowadays to synthesize the sciences, especially to synthesize the physical sciences, the biological sciences and the social sciences, although he did not speak as though very much headway had been made. Nor do I think he was able to do so. The difficulty seems to be in almost everybody’s mind that there is an insurmountable wall between the physical and the biological, the non-living and the living, and between the biological and the societal. We don’t seem to have discovered any common denominator between those three fields.

     The approach that is made in socionomy seems to supply that deficiency, because it discovers that each succeeding level contains all that is in the level below it. That is to say, that all that is in the physical realm is included in the biological, the same atoms, the same forces, the same time units, the same rhythms that there is in the physical realm. And in addition, what is unique to the biological realm is that it has a system of organization different from the other chiefly, if not exclusively, in the fact that its unit is not the quantum of Planck, the least magnitude of energy or event. Its unit, at the biological level, is what is known as the biological cell — all of which are fundamentally alike — and all living structures are regarded as being organizations of those cells in very various forms.

     Ascending still higher, we find that at the societal level, the unit there corresponding with the Planckian unit and with the biological unit, the unit there is the indivisible individual. And all societal phenomena and events are made up of more or less complex organizations and interactivities of these individual units, notwithstanding that they contain all that is in the two levels below them. They contain the same atoms, the same biological cells, the same in kind and principle and, in addition, that which is distinctively human and societal.

     There are three worlds there. There is the physical world in which no animal is found; there is the animal world in which the complete physical world is found; and there is the human world in which alone the societal phenomenon is found. Yet all three of these, the physical, the biological and the societal, are united with the common denominator that each is founded upon a unit, each unit is a multiple of its preceding unit or units, and each organizes its units in fundamentally the same manner that the unit is organized at either of the other two levels. That is the common denominator, which breaks the dilemma in which nearly all thinkers find themselves who are frustrated at the apparent inability to bridge the gap between the physical and the biological and between the biological and the societal.