C. H. Waddington

C. H. Waddington was a British embryologist and geneticist, professor at Edinburgh, who introduced the epigenetic landscape and canalisation, images of how a developing organism is channelled toward its form, and genetic assimilation, by which an acquired response can be taken over by the genes. He was a Marxist in the thirties, an operational researcher in the war, and a theorist of biology’s relation to art and ethics after it. The Nature of Life of 1961 is his short account of what biology had learned and still could not explain, and the Great Books set added it as the biology of the age.