Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
largely observational (Brent, 1999). Much of that science of biology accepted
the diversity that appeared to inhabit the biosphere: organisms were classi-
fied and compared, and their behavior was studied in the sense of establishing
correlations between properties. These correlations were rarely put to the test
in the sense of falsification or even verification; observations were dominant;
laws, even phenomenological ones, were rare. Classificatory concepts sufficed
(Carnap, 1966).
Physicists were much stricter; they expected their codifications to produce
immutable laws. Thus, the type of biology being studied caused many physicists
to disdain biology, which would then be seen as an 'other science' if a science
at all. Biology was 'stamp collecting', and it was claimed that physics was
superior. 'Science is either physics or stamp collecting' is a statement attributed
to Rutherford. Those who have witnessed field biologists efficiently recognizing
birds in complex ecosystems, and predicting with an 80% success rate what the
individual birds would do next, are perhaps less convinced of the truth of the dic-
tum of the physicists. After all, the complexity of the prediction made by the biol-
ogist and what one might consider the total success of that prediction (i.e. success
rate multiplied by complexity) was many times higher than that of the physicist
predicting the probability of the location of an electron on the basis of a wave-
function. Interestingly, chemistry and biochemistry have always been middle-
men; although chemistry was claimed to be a science conforming to the principles
proclaimed by the philosophers of science, it often was not; organic chemistry,
for instance, was rule-based rather than theory-based, albeit fairly successful in
predicting possible chemical reactions and reaction mechanisms. Chemistry war-
rants its own philosophy of science, distinct from that of physics (Primas, 1981).
We suggest that the basic problem of biologists at that time, and to some
degree now, which distinguished it from the objects of study surveyed by physi-
cists, was that the object of their study, i.e. life, was too complex to be amenable
to the 'Physics' of Rutherford. The number of unobserved and in fact unob-
servable degrees of freedom was virtually unlimited. Every possible hypothesis
would always be falsifiable, as there could always be exceptions, or additional
unknown components of the system that would perturb the rule (the 'hidden
variables' of certain approaches to understanding the behaviour of quantum sys-
tems). Even Mendel's 'laws' were subject to many exceptions, and it is now
all too easy to scorn Mendel for overemphasizing the overall principles and for
down playing the aberrations (it is also widely accepted that Mendel's data were
'too good to be true'). What would have happened with Newton discovering
the laws of classical mechanics had the velocity of light been 0.1m/s? Then
Newton would have been plagued by apparent exceptions (because of relativistic
corrections). Or what would have happened if all the objects around us had had
substantial Coulombic charge, so as to perturb the observation of F
=
ma,in
those days at least?
