Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Classical (Organismal (Nagel, 1961)) biology was (and is) a science in that
it obeyed strict methods, was devoid of unfounded predictions and aimed for
reproducibility. It was, however, seen as incomplete in that its predictions were
often perturbed by unexpected variations. On the contrary, it did not shy away
from studying the complex and the most interesting phenomena in existence,
i.e. life.
Much (though not all (Primas, 1981)) of physics did conform to the scientific
methods delineated by the classical philosophers of science. How could it? Well,
first of all it studied objects that happened to be simpler than the objects stud-
ied by biology; billiard balls, protons and electrons are inherently simpler than
haemoglobins, monkeys and tumor cells. Certainly, it has been an extreme chal-
lenge to mankind to understand the circling of electrons around conglomerates
of protons and neutrons, but the scientific achievements have been enormous.
However, the number of degrees of freedom involved in the explanations of
physics has been much smaller than the number of degrees of freedom in the
objects of biology. Physicists (and engineers) sought this simplicity; they pre-
ferred to study single objects or systems with very few degrees of freedom, and
preferably linear interactions. This enabled the discovery of simple principles
and their codification by analytical mathematics. Physics could be physics and
not stamp collecting, precisely because physicists selected a particular subset of
stamps rather than the most beautiful and extensive stamp collections as objects
of study.
This focus on simpler systems and the emphasis on simple principles, often
enforced by first- and perhaps second-order linear approximations, have been
very good for the development of science. Enormous progress was made for
those objects of study that were simple in the above sense. Doubts arose when
others noted that many problems in the environment around us were not being
solved by physics. These included the weather, the behavior of the stock market,
the behavior of the majority of (nonideal) gases, and life and disease.
When confronted with those issues, some physicists reversed the argumenta-
tion. It was not physics itself that was unfit to study those systems that were
more complex. Rather, those objects of studies were unfit for pure physics; they
might perhaps be studied by applied, less pure physics, perhaps through simula-
tion of all the special cases. Nonequilibrium thermodynamics of the Westerhoff
(Westerhoff & van Dam, 1987) type, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of the
Keizer type (Keizer, 1987) and later the discovery of deterministic chaos (e.g.
Gleick, 1988) were such 'impure' physics. On the contrary, they demonstrated
that many aspects of reality may be beyond the understanding of simpler phys-
ical theory. Prigogine was a case in point, searching for a general principle of
nonequilibrium steady states in arbitrary systems, which does not exist (Nicolis
& Prigogine, 1977). Some physicists moved towards biology, accepting that
physics itself should change and adopt complexity. Terrell Hill is one of these,
