The frontispiece of C.H. Waddington's 1940 Organisers and Genes is one of the more enigmatic scientific images of the twentieth century. It depicts Waddington's concept of ‘the epigenetic landscape’, as illustrated by the Romantic–modernist painter John Piper. The scene is deceptively simple: a river flows through a landscape seen from above; tributaries curve away from the main flow of water, which has its origin somewhere along a distant horizon. Except somehow Piper has contrived to make it appear as though the water is flowing uphill. The tributaries are not quite connected to the river. The banks are silhouetted in the form of an almost diagrammatic series of curves. The ambiguities of this image haunt Erik Peterson's Life Organic, which deftly weaves together a series of capsule biographies in such a way that Waddington – a visionary, heterodox developmental biologist – emerges as the main protagonist, his own hopes and fears representing the uneasy history of organicism in the twentieth century.

Just what is the ‘epigenetic landscape’? What is the status of the water, the tributaries, the origin and end point of flow, the land itself? There is, we learn, a straightforward answer: the image depicts the process of ‘canalization’, which in Waddington's words meant ‘the buffering of the genotype against minor variations not only in the environment in which the animals developed but also in its genetic make-up’ (quoted on p. 136). For Waddington, canalization also opened up all sorts of developmental possibilities: if robust environment–genotype interactions could have evolved, then so could highly flexible environment–genotype interactions. Peterson writes that this is ‘not a difficult concept’, and certainly his exemplary summary does render it relatively straightforward. So why the Escher-like oddity of Piper's drawing? And why did Waddington end up in so many tussles with colleagues over the precise meaning and importance of his scientific work and its explication? Why, more broadly, is the history of organicism in biology not itself a more straightforward story?

One answer lies in the notion of landscape itself. For Piper as much as for Waddington, landscape was a synthetic concept in its own right. As Piper was moving back to representative art from abstraction at the end of the 1930s, Waddington was consolidating his long-held belief in the importance of organic wholes into a rigorous research programme. But by the end of the 1930s the high-water mark of organicism had already been reached. The greatest period of excitement had coincided with the meetings of the Theoretical Biology Club, involving such brilliant thinkers and experimenters as Joseph Needham, Dorothy Wrinch, J.H. Woodger, J.D. Bernal and Waddington. That this group didn't stick together, and (just) failed to secure institutional and financial backing, undermined their programme of finding a ‘third way’ between vitalism and mechanism. But nor did it quite put an end to the idea. The Second World War brought Waddington and Piper back to the land itself – Waddington through his work on agricultural genetics, Piper through his return to representative painting after a few years of abstract work. Organicism is the science of holistic thinking, inherited from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and developed through startling experiments in developmental embryology, and heady speculation about process, environment and temporality.

Another kind of thinking runs like a golden thread through twentieth-century science, involving the logic of the code. Alan Turing conceived of a machine that can simulate the work of all other (algorithmic) machines – but the process is recursive, and a Turing machine needn't even be a machine. It could just be instructions in boxes, moved about by men (as in Emil Post's contemporary version). Context or substrate is irrelevant. This is why the language of ‘coding’, from Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944) to Crick's ‘General nature of the genetic code for proteins’ (1961, with Barnett, Brenner and Watts-Tobin), was so provocative to Waddington and the organicists. Genes, for them, had been part of an assemblage of possibilities and restrictions all working together. The notion of a unidirectional ‘coding-for’ gene concept was anathema. But, as one of Peterson's chapter titles reminds us, ‘History of science is written by the laureates’ (Chapter 13), or at least it was in an age when molecular biology was triumphant and other histories seemed trivial.

The Life Organic certainly makes up for this deficit. The title is truly apt: Peterson is deft in the use of biographical detail to add motivation and humour to his story. The chapters that build to the creation and dissolution of the Theoretical Biology Club are a delight. Many parts of this story are known, from the work of Donna Haraway, Pnina G. Abir-Am and others – but this is the first truly synthetic account of this supremely synthetic sub-discipline of biology. In addition, the later chapters, on the fate of organicism in the molecular age, are satisfying insofar as they add continuity to a history that has been largely told in discrete parts, and (as suggested) go some way to explaining the reason for organicism's neglect. This means that the book feels generous: there is more to be done on the research programmes of Waddington and his collaborators, and on the close relationship between post-war history and philosophy of science and practitioners in the life sciences. I would have liked more on general systems theory and cybernetics – these were holistic concepts in the information age and are given short shrift. But perhaps this was a sensible decision given the ambitious chronology and cast of characters being pursued. Whether or not Waddington's epigenetics is a true predecessor of the current science that goes by that name is an interesting question for other commentators to take up. Either way, the book makes a hugely important contribution to the history of biology, and provides a model for others keen to use collective biography in their writing.