Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
3.2. Soon everything will be known
: Will biology become physics,
at last?
Indeed, the vast increase in power of molecular biology, and the ability to
experiment and analyse genome wide, should get biology much closer to the
ideal of constructing completely verifiable and falsifiable theories. Of the above
list of seven limitations, it would seem that the ones regarding undefinedness,
inaccessibility and lack of analysability have disappeared with the advent of
functional and post-genomics. These three criteria come close to the criteria that
proper physics should adhere to, e.g. according to Carnap (1966). Provided that
the analyses of functional genomics are made quantitative, it would seem that
the first criterion (accuracy) will also be met. It would seem therefore that with
functional genomics Biology would all but graduate to become proper physics.
From the point of view that science should be one and indivisible, the reduc-
tion of biology to just another physical chemical science with 'just' the same
methodologies and quality criteria, would seem to be a great good. Whether this
should actually happen is the fundamental issue that is the subject matter of
this topic. We shall now indicate why we think that this reduction is not to be
expected.
3.3. Observing or understanding?
Functional genomics will enable us to observe virtually everything that happens
in living organisms. The aim of the sciences, however, is also to understand the
observations. Such understanding can consist of the possibility of deducing what
is observed from pre-existing theories. It can also amount to the understanding
on the basis of theories that are being generated as many more observations are
made, i.e., through induction, principled hypothesis formulation and hypothesis
testing through verification/falsification procedures.
We shall first address the former basis of understanding. It turns out that
functional genomics has not removed the limitation of irreducibility from bio-
chemistry and molecular biology, and that it will not do this in any foreseeable
future. When it was proposed to sequence the whole genome of organisms, one
of the underlying arguments might have been that this should automatically lead
to the understanding of the functioning of living cells and organisms in molecular
terms. Folding of a protein was perhaps thought to be determined by it finding
the structure with the lowest free energy. Because that free energy is determined
by the interactions of all its amino acids and the sequence of these in the chain, it
was perhaps thought that one should be able to calculate that structure
ab initio
.
For all but the simplest proteins, the calculation of the structure with the lowest
free energy from the amino acid sequence is still impossible. The problem is
strongly nonlinear and hence much too complex to be carried out by existing
