Acta Biotheoretica 36: 275-280 (1987) © Kluwer Academic Publishers - Printed in the Netherlands IDEAS IN THEORETICAL BIOLOGY SOME REMARKS ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DAVID BOHM'S VIEWS FOR BIOLOGY K. KORTMULDER Key words: Physics and biology, Implicate order, Order, Simple process, Nonlocality, Consciousness. ABSTRACT The potential and realized biology are briefly discussed. impact of Bohm's views on The recent publication of a Festschrift for David Bohm (Hiley & Peat, 1987) should draw the attention of the readers of this journal to the work of Dr. Bohm and to its relevance for biology. It is not that Bohm has failed to make his ideas accessible to a larger public. His book 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' (1980) has been widely read and so have Weber's 'Conversations with David Bohm' originally published in ReVision (Bohm, 1982a, 1982b, 1983). Perhaps less well known are his essays on the notion of order, prepared and read to an audience of biologists in 1968 (Bohm, 1969). Nelson (1973) picked up the latter ideas in a study of bird song and other examples of biological orders. Nelson's 1973 paper was characterized three years later by Golani (1976) as being far ahead of its time. It still is -- in the sense that its main points have hardly been followed up by other ethologists, in spite of a substantial growth of factual knowledge in the meantime. Pribram, who had by that time already developed