Organic form and evolution: the morphological problem in twentieth-century italian biology

This paper examines the efforts in evolution research to understand form’s structure that developed in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it analyzes how the organic approach in biology and the study of organic form merged in the morphological research agendas of Giuseppe Colosi (1892–1975) and Giuseppe Levi (1872–1965). These biologists sought to understand form’s inner composition and structure. First, I will briefly outline the morphological practices and frameworks used to study form changes and structures in the early twentieth century. Second, I will discuss what the Italian biologist Antonio Pensa (1874–1970) called the morphological problem. Third, I will examine Colosi’s response to the morphological problem. Fourth, I will analyze Levi’s morphological research program. As a result, this paper paves the way for a more nuanced and varied picture of the so-called “organicism movement” in the first half of the twentieth century by calling attention to morphology as practiced in Italian-speaking biology. In fact, alongside dialectical materialism and holistic biology, two of the main strands within organicism, the architectural approach to evolution as practiced in Italy and elsewhere had a profound impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century organicism specifically and on evolutionary biology generally.