WAS NEWTON THE "DARWIN OF A BLADE OF GRASS" ? KANT'S LEGACY IN THE DARWINIAN THEORY OF EVOLUTION

Kantian criticism left a double legacy to the biology of the 19th Century: his notion of science based on Newtonian mechanism motivates and shapes epistemologically Darwin's theory of evolution, whereas his understanding of organisms as natural purposes gave rise to a teleological morphology. In this paper we pose two questions about the relation between Kant's and Darwin's ideas: 1) whether Kant would have considered Darwin to be the Newton of Biology, to which our answer is affirmative; 2) whether Newtonian Physics is today enough to naturalize Biology. Our negative answer, based on self-organization and evo-devo, allows to set out the naturalization of the Kantian approach to organisms.