Are living organisms predictable?
There is a very interesting feature this month in PLoS biology that talks about one of my favourite themes.
The article is pretty neat and I’m not going to make any comments on it. What interests the most is the seemingly opposed lines of thought that some prominent biologists let’s say “represent”:
- Ernst Mayr, an adamantly defender of biology as an autonomous science, for whom living organisms could not be reduced to laws of physics and pure chemistry.
- Francis Crick who clearly stated that the ultimate aim of biology is to be explained in terms of chemistry and physics.
I think that this two points of view are radical and misleading. I see it as the old debate of nature VS nurture. Nowadays it’s clear that the phenotypic traits of an organism cannot be reduced to only genes or only environment. Something similar applies to this question. Basic physics laws and emergent properties are intertwined in living organisms and the tasks of biologists is to unravel to which extent each of them are involved in the “making” of a living organism.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think we’re that close from pure chemistry and physics nor we have that many, let’s say, “traits” that make us (living things) particularly special.
my 2 cents: it’s about the relative efficiency of different levels of explanation. a phenomenon that can in principle be explained at a low level might only have a practical explanation at a higher level. if you’re serious about discussing that phenomenon you use the higher level so, as in biology, there’s a sense (arguably and non-resolvably) in which the explanation “only” exists at the higher level. Note that an explanation at one level equates to a different sort of explanation at another level. A law at a high level can be one configuration of many (a symmetry breaking) at a lower. perhaps “explaining biology in terms of physics and chemistry” is not quite the same concept as “explaining biology in terms of concepts that are explained in terms of physics and chemistry”, which seems more like what we are doing
Comment by snaxalotl — May 23, 2007 @ 9:56 pm
If the ultimate aim of biology is to be explained in terms of chemistry and physics I would think one would reach the end of the line once you get down to quantum mechanics, which is indeterminate. In other words there is a fundamental limit on our ability to predict the behavior of any physical or biological system, particularly infinitely far into the future.
Comment by Mario Pineda-Krch — June 11, 2007 @ 3:12 pm
It does not surprise me at all that there is opposing lines of evolutionary thought given that the evolutionary paradigm is a contra evidence paradigm with no clear evidential support.
Comment by Michael Fielding — November 23, 2008 @ 5:48 am