ToKers:
Thanks to John for introducing me to the most interesting person who I never paid much attention to (so far this week): Lancelot Law Whyte (1896-1972).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_Law_Whyte
I've just read his fascinating "not" autobiography -- Focus and Diversions (1963) -- and I suspect that it is quite relevant for the ToK Society. Whyte was apparently the go-to fellow for the exploration of "forms" in mid-century, likely as a result of publishing The Unitary Principle in Biology and Physics (in 1948, the year I was born), along with his other books.
Shortly after that, he was asked to edit Accent on Form: Symposium on Form in Nature and Art (1951, honoring D'arcy Thompson, who had just died), followed by Aspects of Form: An Anticipation of the Science of Tomorrow (1954). Shortly after than Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation hired him for a year to wander around. Nice work if you can get it.
Among the anecdotes he recounts was being contacted by three young architects contacted him and asked to meet. When he asked why the answer was, "You're the only one who is alive and in Britain -- Lewis Mumford in the USA and Patrick Geddes is dead." One of them was Jacqueline Tyrwhitt (who would later become close with Marshall McLuhan.) He was also friends with Sigfried Gideon (another McLuhan stalwart and who introduced him to Tyrwhitt.)
Like so many others who attempted to "unify science," he failed -- as he discusses at some length in his life-account.
He winds up with these "predictions" --
1) The twentieth century will be seen to display a convergence towards a new universal world attitude towards man and his problems . . .
2) One of the key features of this coming view of the coherence of phenomena will be a clarified conception of those formative processes in which three-dimensional forms and structures separate from their environment . . .
3) (Mainly for mathematicians.) The decisive factor converting this blind spot into a focus of attention will be the discovery by mathematical physics and biophysics that collective parameters (associated with complex finite systems) are more useful than either atomic or field parameters (associated with parts or points) . . .
4) The decades from 1950 onwards will be recognized as marked by a change in evolutionary philosophy: the gradual discarding of the unduly narrow view of the mechanism of the evolution of the species as due only to the external or Darwinian adaptive slection of matured forms resulting from haphazard mutations.
You be the judge of how much of this actually happened (or not) . . . <g>
Mark
P.S. The closest that I could find to a "follow-up" to Whyte's work is a F. Burwick's Approaches to Organic Form: Permutations in Science and Culture (1987, also at UCLA), which I suspect John can tell us alot about. Btw, a free copy of this $200+ book can be found at memoryoftheworld.org.
https://www.amazon.com/Approaches-Organic-Form-Permutations-Philosophy/dp/9027725411