The Return of Form in Biology: Thinking Through Platonic Morphospace

The mystery of biological form has led some biologists, most prominently Michael Levin, back to Plato’s theory of Ideas. Levin is driven primarily by the surprising empirical findings of his lab. He argues that his results are best explained by reference to modes of causality not traceable to genetic histories or molecular components. While he has chosen to refer to a “Platonic morphospace,” Levin is quick to add that he is not necessarily affirming or denying Plato’s philosophy but only trying to link his hypothesis to a contemporary position in the philosophy of mathematics. 

It is tempting to imagine a realm of timeless patterns that determine the flux of matter. This is the basis of the supposedly physicalist concept of a deterministic “law of nature.” The challenge is to articulate the reality of form (thus avoiding the nihilistic tailspin of nominalism) without slipping into a rigid Platonism where perfect, immutable originals are impressed upon physical bodies conceived as mere passive imitations.

Process philosophy offers an alternative proposal that avoids the extremes of both reductive materialism and transcendent idealism. Rather than treating forms as autonomous agents, it understands them as potentiae—non-historical possibilities with patterned relations among themselves and to actuality generally. These possibilities do not act. They ingress. Agency belongs to actual occasions of experience, the events of concrescence in which the physical inheritance of the past meets the lure of unrealized potential. Forms become effective only as they are selected and transformed within the creative advance of living occasions.

This distinction is crucial. If we say that patterns themselves are the agents, we collapse the polarity between potentiality and actuality. We end up transposing brute fact from the realm of the actual into the realm of the possible, canceling the difference between them and leaving no room for genuine novelty. But if we remember that possibilities require the agential decisions of actualities to enter into history, then we preserve the creative tension driving cosmic evolution.

The living world gives us ample evidence that agency cannot be reduced to local molecular interactions. Cells, tissues, and organisms exhibit large-scale patterns and homeorhesis, near endless ingenuity in the face of perturbation. These are not mechanical outcomes of biochemical reactions. Neither are they dictated from a pre-existent blueprint of forms, genetic or morphological. They arise from living creatures actively negotiating a value-laden field of potentialities, improvising new configurations that cannot, in their singularity, be predicted in advance.

Here we see why metaphysics and cosmology must be carefully distinguished. Cosmology studies contingent patterns and regularities that hold within our present cosmic epoch, including biological habits of development and morphogenesis. These patterns evolve and may change. Metaphysics, by contrast, seeks the categorical conditions that make such patterns possible in the first place. When we confuse the two, we either elevate contingent biological forms of organization into transcendent absolutes or reduce metaphysical conditions to the contingencies of our current epoch.

Whitehead’s dipolar scheme allows us to hold these distinctions together. Eternal objects, as pure potentials, are gathered in the primordial aspect of the divine, unified into a continuum of relevance. Actual achievements, the realized forms of historical becoming, are woven into the consequent nature of God, preserving the memory of what has been and artistically re-attuning it to the lure of what might yet be. God is not an exception to the metaphysical scheme but the first instance of its application, the macrocosmic exemplar of concrescence. In this way, possibility and actuality are dynamically entangled, never collapsed into one another.

Mathematics offers an analogy. Its truths feel timeless, but its practice shows that they emerge through the creative interplay of discovery and invention. Russell and Whitehead’s struggles in Principia Mathematica illustrate the impossibility of grounding the whole edifice in a final logical foundation. Mathematics evolves through paradox, revision, and imaginative leaps. The same is true of biological form. Organisms do not unfold according to rigid templates; they dip into a structured but evolving open field of potential, actualizing new patterns through their own activity.

The stakes of this distinction are not merely conceptual. They shape how we imagine the future of science, philosophy, and life itself. If we treat the latent space of adjacent possibilities as a pre-determinate reservoir of finished designs, then all novelty becomes an illusion. If we treat forms as unreal, reducible to molecular flux, then the evident creativity of life dissolves into noise. Process philosophy seeks to avoid both extremes. It offers instead an ontology of participation: an ever-multiplying plurality of actual occasions relating to one another through a unified continuum of potential forms, guided by a cosmic lure that does not compel but invites compositional intensification. “The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself,” as Whitehead put it. 

Philosophy here becomes less a search for final explanation than a discipline of attunement. There is no arrival, no last word, only the humility of beginning again in media res, listening for the rhythms of a living universe. Forms are not eternal dictators but evolutionary companions, patterns of definiteness that become determined only after they are taken up by living occasions, there perishing out of eternality into immortality. Cosmogenesis does not obey forms but creates out of them.