Page "Brian Goodwin" Paragraph 21

He was also a strong advocate of the view that genes cannot fully explain the complexity of biological systems.

In that sense, he became one of the strongest defenders of the systems view against reductionism.

Among other contributions, he suggested that nonlinear phenomena and the fundamental laws defining their behavior were essential in order to understand biology and its evolutionary paths.

His position within evolutionary biology can be defined as a structuralist one.

To Goodwin, many patterns that we observe in nature are a byproduct of constraints imposed by complexity.

The limited repertoire of motifs observed in the spatial organization of plants and animals ( at some scales ) would be, in Goodwin's opinion, a fingerprint of the role played by such constraints.

The role of selection would be secondary.