Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
of biological systems as autonomous systems provides a means of capturing the
key insight in Bichat's characterization of life.
As I will develop in the next section, in the nineteenth century Claude Bernard,
by focusing on features of the organization of biological systems, took major
steps toward answering Bichat. But the spirit of Bichat's objection lives on in
such attempts as those of Robert Rosen (1991; for analysis, see Mikulecky,
2000), noted above, to contrast living systems with mechanisms. Attention to the
differences between biological systems and humanly engineered mechanisms is
not limited to critics of mechanism. I will develop below some of the fundamental
insights into the nature of biological mechanisms advanced by Tibor Gánti,
but before developing his positive account, it is worth noting how he contrasts
biological systems with extant humanly engineered machines:
First, living beings are soft systems, in contrast with the artificial hard dynamic
systems. Furthermore, machines must always be constructed and manufactured,
while living beings construct and prepare themselves. Living beings are growing
systems, in contrast with technical devices which never grow after their completion;
rather, they wear away. Living beings are multiplying systems and automata (at
least at present) are not capable of multiplication. Finally, evolution - the adaptive
improvement of living organisms - is a spontaneous process occurring of its own
accord through innumerable generations, whereas machines, which in some sense
may also go through a process of evolution, can only evolve with the aid of active
human contribution'.
(Gánti, 2003, pp. 120-121)
Many of these features, such as multiplication and adaptive change through
evolution, are salient differences between extant machines and living systems,
but I take the most fundamental of the features Gánti lists to be the engage-
ment of living beings in self-construction and growth so that they do not
merely wear away or dissipate in the fashion of ordinary physical objects. These
capacities must be exhibited by any system that is to be a candidate for repro-
duction and evolution and are not found in extant machines. Hence, they are
critical phenomena for which any viable mechanistic account must offer an
explanation.
4. FIRST STEPS: BERNARD, CANNON, AND CYBERNETICS
As I noted above, Bernard (1865) took major pioneering steps toward answering
the objections to the mechanistic approach to explaining life advanced by Bichat.
Fundamental to Bernard's view of science was that causal processes are deter-
ministic; accordingly, it was critical for him to explain away the apparent
indeterminism in the activities of living organisms that Bichat had highlighted.
