Joseph Henry Woodger

Waddington himself was a member of the Theoretical Biology Club at Cambridge University, also known as Biotheoretical Gathering, that flourished in the nineteen thirties.

The club, founded by embryologist Joseph Needham and philosopher of science Joseph Woodger, was sympathetic to an organicist philosophy that stood in contrast to the reductionism prevalent in natural sciences at the time.

These theorists followed a third way between vitalism and reductionism, focusing on morphogenesis and hierarchical levels of biological organization.

Arguably, epigenetics as a field also traces its origins to these gatherings.