metabiologyn.

1906 G. S. Hall in Science 23 Feb. 297/2 Psychology may do very well for the present without a soul as physics may do without an ultimate definition of force, or biology without a theory of life. This, moreover, is a positive and gnostic and not an agnostic standpoint except to those who place meta-physics, meta-biology or meta-psychology above these sciences themselves.

1915 Science 26 Feb. 326/1 Those who wonder why Germany, of all places, should prove a relatively favorable soil for modern metabiology.

1921 G. 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.

1936 Scrutiny 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.

1945 K. R. Popper Open Society I. v. 72 Plato's idealist historicism ultimately rests..upon a kind of meta-biology of the race of men.

1962 A. 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.

1968 New 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’.

1976 Philos. Q. 26 168 There is much mention of parallel insights to those which he wrests from Aristotle, in the form of quotations of oriental wisdom and modern meta-biology.

1989 Discover Oct. 86/3 We need a new science—a metabiology—to help us interpret our own models.