Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ribosomes that makes self-fabrication (i.e., life) possible. Moreno takes a differ-
ent point of departure in his chapter. He analyses more deeply the role and the
nature of the (self-) organization, self-maintenance, complexity, and autonomy
of living systems. By giving a very in-depth analysis he manages to present
a rich perspective on living systems laying bare many of the key characteris-
tics of living systems and their relationships. As his analysis is so precise and
encompassing he sketches a picture of living systems that is a lot more inspir-
ing than giving a mere list of characteristics. Many of the views laid out by
Hofmeyr come back in Moreno's contribution. Bechtel stressed the importance
of the modes of organization required to explain life. Keller's exposition initially
focuses more on self-organization, the history of the concept, its meaning, and
its role in characterizing the nature of complex systems in general and living
systems in particular. In the second part of her chapter, she investigates the typ-
ical organization of living systems as a functional organization and investigates
the definition of function. Finally, she addresses how self-organized systems
having a functional organization, in terms of organization, could have evolved
in evolution. All in all, these three contributions give much food for thought and
address in depth a major challenge for the philosophy of biology, and for the
philosophy of systems biology in particular: What is life. We hope that systems
biology and its philosophy shall tackle this fundamental biological question in
the years to come. We anticipate that the recent field of evo-devo (evolutionary
developmental biology) may offer the possibility for many interesting oppor-
tunities for synergetic interaction regarding this interesting and important topic
(see Wimsatt, this volume).
10. CONCLUDING REMARKS
The science of systems biology appears to have much more philosophical conse-
quences than molecular biology, which has been the biological science of the last
decades. Molecular biology was largely driven by technology and its aim was
reductionistic in essence and essentially lacking any philosophical consequences.
It was about characterizing the molecular composition of living systems and not
about coming to understand how the molecular components of living systems
jointly bring about life. Nevertheless, the molecular biosciences proved to be
one of the most successful scientific discipine. They paved the way for systems
biology to emerge.
The topics addressed by systems biology seem to have many more philosoph-
ical consequences, such as mechanisms, emergence, self-organization, networks,
self-maintenance, complexity, systems, control, modeling, function, and (inter-
level) theory. Many of these topics have been discussed at length in this topic.
We hope that this topic will be a spark for more systems biologists to engage
