| 释义 |
metabiˈology
Also meta-biology.
[f. meta- 1 + biology.]
A hypothetical or postulated science dealing with phenomena of living organisms beyond the scope of conventional biology, or treating them in a more fundamental way. Chiefly in non-scientific use, freq. with allusion to Shaw.
1921G. B. Shaw Back to Methuselah Pref. p. lxxxv, As the conception of Creative Evolution developed I saw that we were at last within reach of a faith which complied with the first condition of all the religions that have ever taken hold of humanity: namely, that it must be, first and fundamentally, a science of metabiology. 1936Scrutiny Mar. 377 And Keats's genius..is not really illuminated by the procedure of Keats und Shakespeare or, except as another of Metabiology's cloudy trophies, exalted. 1945K. R. Popper Open Society I. v. 72 Plato's idealist historicism ultimately rests..upon a kind of meta-biology of the race of men. 1962A. Huxley Let. 1 Mar. (1969) 929 He would radiate a kind of religious enthusiasm—about Dostoevsky and his ideas, about ‘metabiology’, about Lawrence as ‘The Son of Man’, the 20th-century Messiah. 1968New Scientist 21 Nov. 415/2 They will be searching for a new integral approach to biology, in which organisms will be described as a whole, rather than simply in the terms of the molecules from which the organisms are constructed... Monod offered to these members of a future biological avant-garde the term ‘meta-biology’.
So ˌmetabioˈlogical a.
1921G. B. Shaw (title) Back to Methuselah: a meta⁓biological pentateuch. 1935Theology XXX. 89 The meta⁓biological reality which Mr. Murry would substitute for Deity. 1960C. S. Lewis Four Loves v. 125 A theory [of the love of lovers] more likely to be accepted in our own day is what we may call Shavian—Shaw himself might have said ‘metabiological’—Romanticism. According to Shavian Romanticism the voice of Eros is the voice of the élan vital or Life Force. 1967Listener 3 Aug. 141/2 Belonging to this period was the spirited exchange of letters between Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley and others which lasted from the beginning of November 1942 to well into March 1943—referred to in the office as the metabiological marathon. |