The Man-Made Future

It gives me a very special pleasure to write this foreword, if only as a way of reliving the forty years during which I was privileged to know C. H. Waddington. Over four decades we discussed the series of problems which concerned him as he moved from the most exquisite experiments in embryology to larger and larger questions of evolution, of the relationships between science and ethics, science and art. In this volume and its companion piece, Tools for Thought (Jonathan Cape/Basic Books, London and New York, 1977) he is concerned with the world problematique and the contributions which a biologist can make to the preservation of human civilisation and human life. As a young anthropologist who had grown up in a tradition of scientific inexplicitness, I first learned what scientific conceptualisations were about from conversations between Waddington and Gregory Bateson, as they leapt from one science to another in the gloriously permissive atmosphere of thinking which was given to young Cambridge biologists in the 1920s. The Man-Made Future contains materials to think with, carefully, imaginatively, meticulously assembled from all of Waddington's interests, years of laboratory experiments in embryology and evolution, active participation in the organisation of science, nationally and inter nationally, and in his final years, dedication to a long look at the present state of our society.