ON THEORY IN BIOLOGY:
SOME
GENERAL INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
By
Robert Rosen
(Copyright, Judith Rosen)
Biology is a very old
subject of human thought, but it is very young as a science. The very name
“biology” is less than two hundred years old. All science, including biology,
starts from empirics; observation and experiment. In biology, even this has
progressed slowly, since biology was seldom able to generate, from within
itself, its own basic observational or experimental tools. Even so fundamental
a tool as a microscope took thousands of years to develop, and depended on a
completely independent science and craft of optics. Most of the equipment found
in a modern biological laboratory has descended from developments in atomic
physics, which date from l930 at the earliest. For these and other historical
reasons, empirical biology has always lagged centuries behind other sciences,
especially physics.
These facts have, more
than anything else, determine the present shape and form of the biological
sciences. People could watch organisms long before they could study them
scientifically. It was evident that organisms behaved differently from
inanimate things. So they speculated about the nature of these patent
differences. Naturally, most of those
speculations were wrong; pre-scientific or even non-scientific, just as they
were in what later became physics. Over the years, biologists have tended to
confuse such speculations with theory; something one did when one had no data,
and something that data alone would make unnecessary.
But this confusion has
itself grown into a theory about biology, and indeed, one which cannot be
refuted by data alone. It has seldom been looked at critically; but the
long-standing distaste engendered by millennia of speculations, and the desire
to anchor everything about organisms in empirics alone, yet remains the hardest
burden for biology itself to overcome. For biology’s deepest questions, the
ones which bind together and convey meaning to all the empirics, and which must
underlie its most profound applications, are not empirical at all. It is these
questions with which theory is always concerned, and never more so than in
biology.
The theory that data, in
one form or another, suffices for everything in biology, is a crucial aspect of
what has come to be called reductionism. In turn, this is a descendant of one
of those speculations about biology which was earlier called mechanism, and was
supposed to be the negation of another speculation, called vitalism. Roughly,
the first asserted that everything about an organism devolved on the same
physics (in those days, mechanics) on which every behavior of everything else
devolved; thus biology was but a special case of physics. Vitalism asserted
that what made organisms so different from inanimate nature devolved on
something not present in the latter, and thus asserted in effect that it was
inanimate physics that was the special case.
The futility of these
kinds of controversies, which went on for centuries, is an example of how a
distaste for speculation has become a denial of the need for theory in biology.
It has been quite different in physics, which is a much older science in every
way, and on which Mechanists tacitly rely as the very basis of their
views. By the time of Galileo and
In physics, then, for the
first time in science, we find what can be called real theory. The first, and
still the basic model for all the others, is today called classical particle
mechanics. A number of others have developed over time; e.g. thermodynamics,
electrodynamics, theory of relativity, quantum theory, etc. They are still
developing. Moreover, a web of relations, itself part of theory, which
interconnect them, continue to be sought. A typical one is the search for the
“unified field”, initiated by Einstein as an extension of Relativity.
None of this is
speculative, in the sense biology has come to fear, but most of it is garbed in
what appears to be an impenetrable mathematical form, the more so as it
progresses. As we have noted, biology is supposed to be a special case of all
this. But no one has ever found biology in it. The conventional explanation for
this fact is that the organic and the inorganic differ physically, not in the
“laws” they satisfy, but entirely in the “initial conditions” they proceed
from. And that the “initial conditions” which lead to the organic are so rare
and so complicated that we must rely entirely upon chance to set them.
This assertion is in fact
a major prediction of mechanistic biological theory. In this view, then, the
problems of life would all be completely solved, entirely within the framework
of contemporary physics, once we could find an appropriate set of “initial
conditions” with which to get the machinery of physical theory started. The
fact is that every organism should in principle provide us with just such a
set, from which we could proceed. But this simply does not happen.
In fact, whenever
contemporary physical theory ventures to deal with the organic world in any
serious way, it either finds nothing to say, or else what it says contradicts
experience. When this happens within physics (and it has happened many times),
it betokens a foundation crisis in physics itself; a crisis which leads not to
specializations, but to generalizations of the theory itself.
These facts show us that
there is nothing “unphysical” or “Vitalistic” about the need to generalize; to
modify, or add something to what is already there. Typically, indeed, the
generalization is such that the original, inadequate theory is recovered as a
limiting case of the generalization. But we never can “reduce” the
generalization back to what it generalizes.
In fact, a theory based
upon initial conditions fed into dynamical laws is in many ways simply
inadequate for biology; it does not, in principle, capture what we need to know
about organisms. At heart, biology is a comparative subject; the systems (organisms)
with which it deals are related to each other, they possess many deep
attributes in common. These attributes pertain to the way they are organized;
not to the particles of which they are composed.
In the theory of
Mechanism, which treats every material system as a thing in itself, this
“organization” becomes entirely an epiphenomenon, a consequence of general Laws
applied to a specified set of initial conditions. To study any system in these
terms, we must start from these beginnings, system by system, organism by
organism. There is nothing in this theory to make use of the fact that our
system is in fact an organism.
There is in particular no
way to extrapolate knowledge or experience with any one such system to help
with, or shorten, the analysis of any other. It is as if, whenever we needed to
solve an algebraic, polynomial equation, we needed to start all over again, and
learn how to extract its particular roots. It is as if, in this case, we had no
access to a true Theory of Equations, which deals with all such simultaneously,
and obviates any need to start all over again in each special case.
This is the basis for true
theory in biology; to start from the shared organizational features which are
manifested by organisms, and not to hope to end up with them on a case-by-case
basis. Physics has seldom even tried to deal with problems of this kind.
This essentially
comparative aspect, which characterizes biology from the beginning, and is so
alien to the spirit of so much of classical physics (though there are some
prominent exceptions) is what makes it so hard to express biological phenomena
in the reductionistic terms which Mechanism requires. They also, as we shall
see, make it difficult to apply biological lessons to other classes of
problems, such as those based in technology, or in social systems.
In a nutshell, what is
mandated by biology is to get away from the case-by-case analysis which
reductionistic theory requires, and in which organization, if it appears at
all, appears only at the end.
This requires, roughly,
treating organization as a thing, rather than as merely a property of a
thing. We can then keep this
organization fixed while we, in a sense, change the matter under it, instead of
keeping the matter fixed and watch the organization change as we rearrange
it.
It turns out that this
change of viewpoint, which allows us to approach the interfaces between biology
and other sciences, between biology and technology, between biology and social
systems from the biological side, and not exclusively from the side of physics
and chemistry, throws an entirely new light, not only on these interfaces, but
on science itself. This is precisely what theory is supposed to do.
ON THEORY AND PRACTICE IN GENERAL
Biology is unique in the
way it directly interfaces with every other part of science and technology. As
we have seen, it must interface with the sciences of the inorganic sitting
beneath it; with physics and with chemistry.
Because biological systems perform functions in the course of
maintaining their viability, how organisms behave impacts on technology in
general; i.e. on how to get functions carried out in general. And because
organisms are both themselves populations, and are the units for other kinds of
populations, their properties bear in several distinct and basic ways on
problems associated with social organization.
Biology, sitting precisely
at these interfaces, builds the bridges and provides the cement which ties all
these enterprises together, to form a conceptual whole. Indeed, in this way, we
can look upon biology as a vast encyclopedia, teaching profound lessons about
all these other realms, precisely because bio-evolution has confronted them,
and solved them (or often, failed to solve them) before. This may indeed be the
most precious resource which biology has bequeathed to humankind, this
encyclopedia. But to use it, we have to learn how to read it and how to
interpret its messages-- within biology itself, and across the interfaces
between biology and its neighbors.
We cannot correctly read
biology’s messages, much less apply them, by looking at them through
reductionistic spectacles. On the other hand, a theory based on organization
and function, largely independent of underlying material bases, is tailor-made
to cross the barriers at these interfaces; barriers created precisely by trying
to approach them exclusively from their non-biological sides.
Across each interface
between biology and another science or technology, transport of concepts from
the biological side inherently creates a biotechnology. There are several
familiar such biotechnologies, which in the past have clustered around such
areas as medicine, agriculture or husbandry, and nowadays, ecology and
environment. But as we shall see, there are many others, involving other
interfaces.
It is one of the tasks of
theory, not only to illuminate the basis of organic behavior in itself, but to
translate this illumination across the interfaces between biology and other
realms of human activity. That is: it is
a basic task of biological theory to create biotechnologies. Oddly, there has
never been a science of such creation.
Invention is regarded as an entirely subjective realm; a realm of art
and craft rather than of science. In philosophic terms, science deals with
epistemology, with the objective knowledge of what is; bringing new things into
existence is not its province; that belongs rather to ontology, which is
concerned with how things come to be.
Ironically, biology itself
provides a ground upon which epistemology and ontology directly meet. Put
simply, organisms are themselves fabricators; they build new things, they make
new things, they deploy new things. Hence, an essential part of a theory of
organism is precisely a theory of fabrication; a theory of invention and
deployment. Thus, a theory of organisms has within itself an ineluctable
ontological component; a science of fabrication. Nothing shows more clearly
than this the unique character of biology among the sciences, and the unique role
that its own theory must play in its own application.
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