from the book: Toward a New Philosophy of Biology
All recent volumes on the philosophy of biology begin with the
question: What is the position of biology in the sciences? "Whether
and how biology differs from the other natural sciences... is the most
prominent, obvious,frequently posed, and controversial issue the
philosophy of biology faces," according to Rosenberg (1985:13). This
battle over the status of biology has been waged between two distinct
camps. One claims that biology does not differ in principles and
methods from the physical sciences, and that further research,
particularly in molecular biology, will in time lead to a reduction of
all of biology to physics. Ruse (1973), for example, wondered "whether
or not we can look forward to the day when biology as an autonomous
discipline will vanish." The other camp claims that biology fully
merits status as an autonomous sciences because it differs fundamentally
in its subject matter, conceptual framework, and methodology from the
physical sciences.
Part of the controversy arose from a different interpretation of the
word autonomy. If one could plot the domains of the physical and
biological sciences on a map, one would find a considerable area of
overlap, particularly at the molecular level, where the laws of
physics and chemistry dominate. Does this argue against autonomy for
biology? For those who define autonomy as a complete separation of the
two sciences, this important area of overlap refutes the claim for
autonomy. Proponents of the opposing viewpoint, on the other hand,
point to the equally important areas not overlapped by the physical
sciences and insist that only an autonomous science can adequately
study them.
This unfortunate controversy is a product of history. When science
reawakened after the Middle Ages, in the work of Galileo and Newton
and later Lavoiseir, it was almost exclusively a movement of the
physical sciences. Biology as a discipline was still dormant and did
not really come to life until the 1830s and 1840s. For the
philosopher, from Bacon and Descartes to Locke and Kant, the physical
sciences, and in particular mechanics, were the paradigm of
science. The proper way to study the natural world, according to this
view, was to define phenomena in terms of movements and forces that
obeyed universal laws-that is, laws which were not in any way
restricted in time or space nor subject to any exceptions. Such
deterministic laws allowed a strict prediction of future events, once
the present conditions were understood. The role of chance in natural
processes was completely ignored. Consequently, the controlled
experiment was considered the only respectable scientific method,
whereas observation and comparison were viewed as considerably less
scientific.
As everyone was willing to concede, the universality and
predictability that seemed to characterize studies of the inanimate
world were missing from biology. Because life was restricted to the
earth, as far as anyone knew, any statements and generalization one
could make concerning living organisms would seem to be restricted in
space and time. To make matters worse, such statements nearly always
seemed to have exceptions. Explanations usually were not based on
universal laws but rather were pluralistic. In short, the theories of
biology violated every canon of "true science," as the philosophers
had derived them from the methods and principles of classical physics.
Even after the conceptual framework of physics changed quite
fundamentally during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a
mechanistic approach continued to dominate the philosophy of
science. As a result, biology was referred to as a "dirty science," an
activity, according to the physicist Ernest Rutherford, not much
better than "postage stamp collecting." At best it was a second-class,
"provincial" science.
Biologists responded to the claims of the physicist and philosophers
in one of three ways. Many of them, particularly those working in
physiology and other branches of functional biology, adopted
physicalism and attempted to explain all biological processes in terms
of movements and forces. Everything was mechanistic, everything was
deterministic, and there was no unexplained residue. Jacques Loeb,
Carl Ludwig, and Julius Sachs were perhaps the leaders of physicalist
biology. As productive as this approach was, particularly in
physiology, it left a vast number of phenomena in the living world
totally unexplained.
Other biologists, by contrast, felt that a living organism had some
constituent that distinguished it from inert matter. These people were
customarily lumped together under the term vitalists, even though, as
we shall see, they held widely differing views of that constituent
might be.
Most biologists, though, simply ignored the philosophical problems of
the nature of life and instead concentrated on making new discoveries
and elaborating new theories. The result was the unprecedented flowering
of evolutionary biology, ecology, ethology, population genetics,
cytology, and many other biological disciplines. Each of these fields
had its own terminology, methodology, and conceptual framework, and
maintained only a minimal contact with the others or with physical
sciences. The worry spread, particularly among philosophers, that
science as whole would be lost, replaced by a large number of
independent individual sciences. To counteract this threat, a movement
got under way for the unification of science.
But how was unification to be achieved? There seemed to be two broad
possibilities:
(1) To bring all sciences down to the common denominator of the physical sciences; in other words, as it was phrased by certain philosophers, "by reducing all sciences to physics."
(2) To adopt a new, broader concept of science that would fit not only the physical sciences but also the life sciences.
It has become quite clear from the discussion of the modern
philosophers of science that the validity of the claim of an autonomy
of biology depends entirely on the success of the postulated
reduction. What we need, then, is an answer to the question: "Can the
phenomena, laws, and concepts of biology be successfully reduced to
those of the physical sciences?" If such a reduction is impossible,
then the autonomy of biology is, so to speak, automatically
established.
The 1960s and early 1970s saw quite a few uncompromising
reductionists, but their number has dwindled in the last ten
years. Only one strict reductionist has come to my attention since
1980. One problem in the reductionist has camp was that the term
reduction was being used by different authors in very different
senses. One can distinguish three major kinds of reduction:
(1) The term constitutive reduction has been applied to any dissection of phenomena, events, and processes into the constituents of which they are composed. Such analysis is not opposed by the modern biologist, since he does not question that all organic processes can ultimately be reduced to or explained by physico-chemical processes. None of the events and processes encountered in the world of living organism is in any conflict with a physico-chemical explanation at the level of atoms and molecules. What is controversial are two other kinds of reduction, explanatory reduction and theory reduction.
(2) Explanatory reduction claims that all the phenomena and processes at higher hierarchical level can be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of the components at the lowest hierarchical level. Organicists, by contrast, claim that new properties and capacities emerge at higher hierarchical levels and can be explained only in terms of the constituents at those levels. For instance, it would be futile to try to explain the flow of air over the wing of an airplane in terms of elementary particles. Almost any phenomenon studied by a biologist relates to a highly complex system, the components of which are usually several hierarchical levels above the level studied by physical scientists.
(3) Finally, there is theory reduction, which postulates that the theories and laws formulated in biology are only special cases of theories and laws formulated in the physical sciences, and that such biological theories can thus be reduced to physical theories. All authors in recent years who have studied this claim, including even several former reductionists, have come to the conclusion that such theory reduction is virtually never successful. As a matter of fact, theory reduction has been only partially successful even within the physical sciences, and has been singularly unsuccessful within the biological sciences. Indeed, none of the more complex biological laws has ever been reduced to and explained in terms of the composing single processes.
The splendid successes of molecular biology are sometimes cited as
evidence for successful reduction, but these cases concern
constitutive reduction, and furthermore they are limited almost
exclusively to functional biology. Ernest Nagel (1961) was the chief
proponent of theory reduction, but most other philosophers of science
(Feyerabend, Kuhn, and Kitcher) have vigorously opposed his arguments.
I think it is fair to say that the attempt to unify science by
reducing biology to physics has been a failure, as pointed out by
Popper (1974), Beckner (1974), Kitcher (1984), and other. Fortunately,
changes have taken place in the last several decades in both physics and
biology that will greatly facilitate an eventual unification of the
two sciences on a very different, much broader basis.
The changes in the physical sciences involve, among other things, a
rejection of the strict determinism of classical physics. Scientists
now recognize that most physical laws are not universal but are rather
statistical in nature, and that prediction therefore can only be
probabilistic in most cases. They have also realized that stochastic
processes operate throughout the universe, at every level, from
subatomic particles to weather systems, to ocean currents, to
galaxies. In the study of these processes, observation has been
elevated to the status of a valid scientific method wherever the
experiment is difficult or impossible to perform, as in meteorology
and cosmology. And finally, physicists are beginning to recognize that
the development of concept can be powerful a tool as the formulation
of laws in understanding physical phenomena.
The changes in biology were, if anything, even more
drastic. Physiology lost its position as the exclusive paradigm of
biology in 1859 when Darwin established evolutionary biology. When
behavioral biology, ecology, population biology, and other branches of
modern biology developed, it became even more evident how unsuitable
mechanics was as the paradigm of biological science. At the same time
that an exclusively physicalist approach to organisms was being
questioned, the influence of the vitalist was also diminishing, as
more and more biologists recognized that all processes in living
organisms are consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry, and
that the differences which do exist between inanimate matter and
living organisms are due not to a difference in substrate but rather to
a different organization of matter in living systems.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the label vitalist was
attached to anyone who did not accept the mechanist dogma that matter
in motion is an adequate explanatory basis for all aspects of life,
and that organisms are simply machines. All those who rejected this
characterization were united in their belief that a living organism
has some sort of constituent by which it can clearly be distinguished
from inert matter. Where a controversy arose, however, was in the
interpretation of this constituent.
The classical vitalist ascribed life to the organism's possession of a
tangible thing, a real object, whether called a valid fluid, life
force, or Entelechie. He believed that this vital force was outside
the realm of physico-chemical laws; in fact, it had a rather
metaphysical flavor in the writings of some vitalists. All attempts
to substantiate the existence of this force failed, and the need for
it became obsolete when the phenomena it had tried to explain were
eventually accounted for by other means, for example, the genetic
program.
Other biologists agreed with the classical vitalist that organisms have
some unique property that exists in every part of the body, on that is
extinguished by death. They attributed to it everything that
distinguishes living bodies from inert matter, particularly the
form-giving processes of ontogeny. But these authors rejected the idea
that this was a nonmaterial force; rather, they viewed life as an
organizational property of certain material systems. In the absence of
an appropriate term, some of these authors, like the famous
physiologist Johannes Muller, referred to these life-giving properties
as Lebenskraft, but as Delbruck (1971) pointed out, there is a
remarkably close analogy between the postulated properties of the
Lebenskraft of many authors from Aristotle on and the actual
properties of the genetic program (DNA).
This second group of biologists might be best referred to as
organicists. In any case, it is quite misleading to attach the label
vitalist to them. Anyone who does this and insist on the strict
matter-in-motion definition of organisms will have to call everybody a
vitalist who acknowledges the genetic program. Vitalism has become so
disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive
today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants
of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy,
Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, who seem to believe in some sort of
nonmaterial principle in organisms.
Vitalistic ideas, curiously, were widespread among certain
non-biologists whose simplicistic ideas about the nature of
physico-chemical systems forced them into vitalism. Some of the leaders
of quantum mechanics, such as Bohr, Scroedinger, Heisenberg, and
Pauli, postulated that someday someone would discover physical laws in
organisms that were different from those which operate in inert
matter. Indeed, when Max Delbruck switched from physics to biology,
one of his original objectives was to discover such laws.
Establishing and substantiating the autonomy of biology has been a slow and painful process. It has meant getting rid not only of standard concepts of physicalism, such as essentialism and determinism, but also of some metaphysical concepts favored by certain biologists who intuitively felt the separate status of biology but ascribed it to such metaphysical factors as vitalism or teleology. Even today, many attacks against the notion that biology is an independent science concentrate on refuting vitalism, as though this was still part of the conceptual framework of modern biology. That some early autonomists, like Bertalanffy (1949), supported their position with such vague arguments as dynamics, energy gradients, formative movements, and so on did not enhance the credibility of the new movement. Despite these handicaps,the evidence in support of the autonomy of biology has grown exponentially in recent years. Let me now describe, one by one, some of the fondamental differences between organisms and inert matter.
Living systems are characterized by a remarkably complex organization
which endows them with the capacity to respond to external stimuli, to
bind or release energy (metabolism), to grow, to differentiate, and to
replicate. Biological systems have the further remarkable property
that they are open systems, which maintain a steady-state balance in
spite of much input and output. This homeostasis is made possible by
elaborate feedback mechanisms, unknown in their precision in any
inanimate system.
Such complexity has often been singled out as the most characteristic
feature of living systems. Actually, complexity in and of itself is
not a fundamental difference between organic and inorganic
systems. The world's weather system or any galaxy is also a highly
complex system. On the average, however, organic systems are more
complex by several orders of magnitude than those of inanimate
objects. Even at the molecular level, the macromolecules that
characterize living beings do not differ in principle from the
lower-molecular-weight molecules that are the regular constituents of
inanimate nature, but they are much larger and more complex. This
complexity endows them with extraordinary properties not found in
inert matter.
The complexity of living systems exists at every hierarchical level,
from the nucleus, to the cell, to any organ system (kidney, liver,
brain), to the individual, to the species, to the ecosystem, the
society. The hierarchical structure within an individual organism
arises from the fact that the entities at one level are compounded into
new entities at the next higher level-cells into tissues, tissues into
organs, and organs into fuctional systems.
To be sure, hierarchical organization is not altogether absent in the
inanimate world, where elementary particles from atoms, which in
turn form molecules, and then crystals, and so on. But order in the
inanimate realm is several levels of magnitude below the order of
ontogenetic development, as illustrated by the growth of the peacock's
tail or the organization of the central nervous system.
Systems at each hierarchical level have two properties. They act as
wholes (as though they were a homogeneous entity), and their
characteristics cannot be deduced (even in theory) from the most
complete knowledge of the components, taken separately or in other
combinations. In other words, when such a system is assembled from its
components, new characteristics of the whole emerge that could not
have been predicted from a knowledge of the constituents. Such
emergence of new properties occurs also throughout the inanimate
world, but only organisms show such dramatic emergence of new
characteristics at every hierarchical level of the system. Indeed, in
hierarchically organized biological systems one may even encounter
downward causation.
Western thinking for more than 2000 years after Plato was dominated by
essentialism. For Plato and his followers, variable classes of
entities consist of imperfect reflections of a fixed number of
constant, discontinuous eide or essences. This is vividly illustrated by
Plato's allegory of the shadows on the cave wall. This concept fits
classes of inanimate objects, say the class of chairs or the class of
lakes-objects that have no special relation with each other except
that they share the same definition.
In 1859 Darwin introduced the entirely new concept of variable
populations composed of unique individuals. For those who have
accepted population thinking, the variation from individual to
individual within the population is the reality of nature,whereas the
mean value (the "type") is only a statistical
abstraction. Biopopulations differ fundamentally from classes of
inanimate objects not only in their propensity for variation but also
in their internal cohesion and their spatio-temporal
restriction. There is nothing in inanimate nature that corresponds to
biopopulations, and this perhaps explain why philosophers whose
background is in mathematics or physics seem to have such a difficult
time understanding this concept. The ability to make the switch from
essentialist thinking to population thinking is what made the theory
of evolution through natural selection possible.
The concept of biopopulations also made possible the recognition that
there are, in nature, two entirely different kinds of evolution,
designated by Lewontin (1983) as developmental (transformational)
evolution and varational evolution. Any change in an object or system
simply as a result of its intrinsic potential, such as the change of a
white star to a red star, is developmental evolution. It is entirely due
to the action of teleomatic (physical) processes. By contrast, the
evolution of organisms is variational evolution, and is due to the
selection of certain entities from highly variable populations of
unique individuals, and the production of new variation in every
generation.
To say that all members of a population are unique does not mean that
they differ from one another in every respect. On the contrary, they
may agree with one another in most respects, as do conspecific
individuals, for instance. Yet each member of a species has a unique
constellation of characteristics, some of which are found in no other
individual.
Although highly characteristic of the living world, uniqueness is not
exclusive to it. Each mountain is unique; so is each weather system,
and each planet and star. However, such uniqueness in the inanimate
world is limited to complex systems (elementary particles, atoms,
molecules, and crystals) consist of identical components. In the
living world, uniqueness is seen even at the molecular level, in the
form of DNA or RNA.
Organism are unique at the molecular level because they have a
mechanism for the storage of historically acquired information, while
inanimate matter does not. Perhaps there was an intermediate condition
at the time of the origin of life, but for the last three billion
years or more this distinction between living and non-living matter has
been complete. All organisms possess a historically evolved genetic
program, coded in the DNA of the nucleus (or RNA is some
viruses). Nothing comparable exists in the inanimate world, except in
man-made machines. The presence of this program given organisms a
peculiar duality, consisting of a genotype and a phenotype. The
genotype (unchanged in its components except for occasional mutations)
is handed on from generation to generation, but, owing to
recombination, in ever new variations. In interaction with the
environment, the genotype controls the production of the phenotype,
that is, the visible organism which we encounter and study.
The genotype (genetic program) is the product of a history that goes
back to the origin of life, and thus it incorporates the
"experiences"of all ancestors, as Delbruck (1949) said so rightly. It
is this which makes organisms historical phenomena. The genotype also
endows them with the capacity for goal-directed (teleonomic) processes
and activities, a capacity totally absent in the inanimate world.
Since each genetic program is a unique combination of thousands of
different genes, the differences among them cannot be expressed in
quantitative but only qualitative terms. Thus, quality becomes one of
the dominant aspects of living organisms and their
characteristics. Qualitative differences are particularly obvious when
one compares properties and activities of different species, be it
their courtship displays, pheromones, niche occupation, or whatever
else may characterize a particular species.
The experiment has traditionally been the primary means of
investigation in the physical sciences, and some philosophers have
claimed that it is the only legitimate method of science. In fact,
since the days of Copernicus and Kepler, observation and comparison
have been exceedingly successful methods in such physical sciences as
astronomy, geology, oceanography, and meteorology. And in biology,
where observation and comparison have always been of paramount
importance, experimental methods have been incorporated into the
methodological repertory of many originally observational disciplines,
including ecology and ethology.
The roles of the experimental and comparative methods in biology can
be understood only if one realizes that biology actually consists of
two rather different major fields of study. The first is the biology
of proximate causations (broadly, functional biology0, and the second
is the biology of ultimate causations (evolutionary biology).
There is nothing in the physical sciences that corresponds to the
biology of ultimate causations. The claims that the evolution of
galaxies or radioactive decay correspond to biological processes are
quite erroneous. Evolution in galaxies is transformational, not
variational, evolution, and radioactive decay, controlled by physical
laws, is a teleomatic process, not a teleonomic one, as claimed by
Nagel (1977).
Early in the century there was virtually no communication between the
two biologies of proximate and ultimate causations. As we have seen,
the functional biologists tended to be physicalists and inductionists,
accepting only the experiment as the method of science. The
evolutionary biologists tended to have an opposite point of view,
dependent as they were on observation and comparison. Since then,
biologists have realized that functional and evolutionary questions
are equally legitimate, even though they may require very different
approaches. No biological phenomenon can be fully explained until both
sets of causations have been explored.
Broadly speaking, functional biology deals with the decoding of the
genetic program and with the reactions of an organism to its
surrounding world from the moment of fertilization to the moment of
death. Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, deals with the history
of genetic programs and the changes that they have undergone since the
origin of life. A philosopher who fails to recognize both of these two
very important and very different aspects of biology will arrive at
conclusions that are at best incomplete, but more likely wrong.
The conceptual framework of biology is entirely different from that of
the physical sciences and cannot be reduced to it. The role that such
biological processes as meiosis, gastrulation, and predation play in
the life of an organism cannot be described by reference only to
physical laws or chemical reactions, even though physico-chemical
principles are operant. The broader processes that these biological
concepts describe simply do not exit outside the domain of the living
world. Thus, the same event may have entirely different meanings in
several different conceptual domains.
The courtship of a male animal, for instance, can be described in the
language and conceptual framework of the physical sciences
(locomotion, energy turnover, metabolic processes, and so on), but it
can also be described in the framework of behavioral and reproductive
biology. And the latter description and explanation cannot be reduced
to theories of the physical sciences. Such biological phenomena as
species, competition, mimicry, territory, migration, and hibernation
are among the thousands of examples of organismic phenomena for which
a purely physical description is at best incomplete if not
irrelevant. For a long time concepts were rather neglected in the
physical sciences. Their importance, under the name of themata, has
recently been emphasized by Holton (1973).
There is perhaps no better way to demonstrate the epistemological
differences between the physical sciences and organismic biology that
to point to the different roles of laws in the two sciences. In classical
physics, laws were considered universal, and Popper's
falsifiability principle was based on this conception. Up to the end of
the nineteenth century, biologists also tended to explain all
phenomena and processes as being due to the operation of
laws. Darwin's Origin of Species refers to laws controlling certain
biological processes no fewer than 106 times in 490 pages.
Today, the word law is used sparingly, if at all, in most writings
about evolution. Generalizations in modern biology tend to be
statistical and probabilistic and often have numerous
exception. Moreover, biological generalizations tend to apply to
geographical or otherwise restricted domains. One can generalize from
the study of birds, tropical forests, freshwater plankton, or the
central nervous system but most of these generalizations have so
limited an application that the use of the word law, in the sense of
the laws of physics, is questionable.
At the same time, some very comprehensive biological theories have been
formulated concerning the mechanism of inheritance, the basic
processes of evolutionary change, and certain physiological phenomena
from the molecular level up to that of organs. These theories of
biology "appear comparable in scope, explanatory power, and evidential
support to those of the physical sciences," according to Munson. Yet
every student of biology is impressed by the fact that there is hardly
a theory in biology for which some exceptions are not known.
The so-called laws of biology are not the universal laws of classical
physics but are simply high-level generalizations. Hence, as Kitcher
has stated:"There are a number of sciences that proceed
extraordinarily well without employing any statements which can
uncontroversially be called laws."
In the physical sciences it is axiomatic that a given process or
condition must be explained by a single law or theory. In the life
sciences, by contrast, various forms of pluralism are frequent. For
instance, a particular adaptation may have been produced by several
different evolutionary pathways. A condition of adaptedness of the
phenotype of an individual may have been due to a particular response
by the norm of reaction-or it may have been strictly determined by the
genotype. The response of a complex system is virtually never a strict
response to a single extrinsic factor but rather the balanced response
to several factors, and the end result of an evolutionary process may
be a compromise between several selection forces. In the study of
causations the biologist must always be aware of this potential
pluralism.
A belief in universal, deterministic laws implies a belief in absolute prediction. The ability to predict was therefore the classical test of the goodness of an explanation in physics. In biology, the pluralism of causations and solutions makes prediction probabilistic, if it is possible at all. Prediction in the vernacular sense, that is, the foretelling of future events, is as precarious in biology as it is in meteorology and other physical sciences dealing with complex systems. As Scriven (1959) has pointed out, the ability to predict is not a requirement for the validity of a biological theory.
Since the Greeks, philosophers and theologians have been impressed by
the frequency of seemingly end-directed processes in living matter-the
growth of an organism from egg to adult, the annual migrations of
animals, the perfection of the eye and other organs. The belief that
there is a purpose, a predetermined end, in the processes of nature
has been referred to as teleology. Actually, the term has been applied
to four entirely different and independent phenomena, and this has led
to considerable confusion.
Natural selection is not a teleological but a strictly a posteriori
process. Adaptedness, as the result of a process of selection, is a
condition unknown in the inanimate world. More smoothing and rounding
does not make a pebble better adapted for its existence in a river
bed. Snow is not an adaptation of water to cold temperature. But many
arctic animals (ptarmigans, snowshoe hares) have adaptations that
prevent their feet from sinking into the snow. Since adaptedness is a
result of the past and not an anticipation of the future, it does not
qualify for the epithet "teleological."
The preceding list of biology's unique characteristics as a science explains why attempts to reduce biology and its theories to physics have been a failure. Does this mean that a unification of science is impossible? Not in the least. All it mean is that such a unification cannot be achieved by reducing biology to physics. Rather, we have to search for a new foundation for such a unification. What should it be? G.G.Simpson (1964) has proposed a somewhat extreme interpretation:
Insistence that the study of organisms requires principles additional to those of the physical sciences does not imply a dualistic or vitalistic view of nature. Life ... is not thereby necessarily considered as nonphysical or nonmaterial. It is just that living things have been affected for ... billions of years by historical processes. ... The result of those processes are systems different in kind from any nonliving systems and almost incomparably more complicated. They are not for that reason any less material or less physical in nature. The point is that all known material processes and explanatory principles apply to organisms, while only a limited number of them apply to nonliving systems. Biology, then, is the science that stands at the center of all science, and it is here, in the field where all principles of all the sciences are embodied, that science can truly become unified.
We may not need to accept all these sweeping claims. However, Simpson
has clearly indicated the direction in which we have to move. I
believe that a unification of science is indeed possible if we are
willing to expand the concept of science to include the basic
principles and concepts of not only the physical but also the
biological sciences. Such a new philosophy of science will need to
adopt a greatly enlarged vocabulary-one that includes such words as
biopopulation, teleonomy, and program. It will have to abandon its
loyalty to a rigid essentialism and determinism in favor of a broader
recognition of stochastic processes, a pluralism of causes and
effects, the hierarchical organization of much of nature, the
emergence of unanticipated properties at higher hierarchical levels,
the internal cohesion of complex systems, and many other concepts
absent from-or at least neglected by-the classical philosopy of
science.
Twenty-nine years ago the physicist C.P.Snow vividly described the
unbridgeable gap between the physical sciences and the humanities. If
biologists, physicists, and philosophers working together can
construct a broad-based, unified science that incorporates both the
living and the nonliving world, we will have a better base from which
to build bridges to the humanities, and some hope of reducing this
unfortunate rift in our culture. Paradoxical as it may seem,
recognizing the autonomy of biology is the first step toward such a
unification and reconciliation.