Is Biology Autonomous from the Physical Sciences?

Background of the Debate

Biological science has undergone a period of progressive change in the last few decades. A distinctive element of this progress has been the continuous addition of fresh theoretical perspectives and methods from physics and chemistry — the physical sciences. The most interesting recent innovations in contemporary biology are closely linked with how these new theories and methods are applied. There is broad consensus that many phenomena that once occurred naturally within the arena of biological science have been overtaken by a science that is practically physical. The explicit reference of newly expanded fields such as "biophysics," "biochemistry," and molecular biology apparently points to new frameworks for treating the science of life on earth according to chemical and physical principles (Hansen, 1969).

What Is Biology?

In attempting to answer this question, it is worth noting that biology is, in actual fact, composed of two distinct and separate fields: historical biology and mechanistic or functional biology. All activities related to the physiology of living organisms fall under functional biology, particularly in relation to cellular processes where the genome is concerned. It is noteworthy that all these cellular functions can find adequate explanation in purely mechanistic, physical, and chemical terms.

The other biological branch is historical in character, and purely functional processes cannot be explained by knowledge of history — much as this knowledge is important for explaining general aspects of the living world when the theory of evolution is taken into account. The type of questions most frequently asked also distinguishes these two fields of biology. The most commonly asked question in functional biology is "how?" while in evolutionary biology the frequently asked question is "why?" Even so, the distinction is not absolute, because even in evolutionary biology one occasionally asks "how" questions — for example, how can one explain the multiplication of species? One must therefore take note of the essential differences between the two classes of biology in order to understand its remarkable nature. Indeed, some of the most distinctive differences between biology and the physical sciences hold true for only one of its branches, namely evolutionary biology (Mayr, 2004).

How the Reductionism Debate Began

Up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biology was practically a marginal subject. Despite the fact that an enormous body of factual knowledge in natural history, physiology, and anatomy was gathered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was widely believed that the world of life during that period belonged purely to the medical realm. However, this was only true for physiology and anatomy, and in some cases botany, which to a large extent comprised identifying plants with medicinal value. Important elements of natural history were in practice either regarded as a hobby or as an expression of natural theology. When mechanics was recognized as an exemplary science, a new school of thought emerged holding that organisms were essentially the same as inert matter (Mayr, 1997).

The logical conclusion drawn from this assumption was that the prime objective of science was to subjugate biology to the laws of physics and chemistry. With the passage of time, however, progress in biology rendered this theory untenable. Biology gained a stronger foothold in the scientific sphere when vitalism and its counterpart, mechanism, were overtaken by the acceptance of the new theory of organicism in the twentieth century — this despite the fact that many philosophers of science had not yet fully accepted the impact of this new paradigm (Mayr, 1997).

Three very distinct views on the position of biology among the sciences emerged from the mid-twentieth century. One extreme position held that biology should not be regarded as a science because it lacks the universally accepted quantitative and structured laws of a "true science," with physics serving as the reference point. At the opposite end of the spectrum, biology not only shares the qualities of a true science but differs from physics in essential ways that rank it as an autonomous science in its own right. Between these two opposing views, a third position regards biology as a "provincial science" on the grounds that its findings are ultimately reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics and are therefore not universal (Mayr, 1997).

References

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Hansen, N. R. (1969). On the reduction of biology to physical science. Synthese, 20(2), 277–289.

Mayr, E. (1996). The autonomy of biology: The position of biology among the sciences. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 71(1), 97–106.

Mayr, E. (1997). This is biology: The science of the living world.

Mayr, E. (1998). Is biology an autonomous science?

Mayr, E. (2004). The autonomy of biology. Ludus Vitalis, 12(21), 15–27.

Mayr, E. (2004). What makes biology unique? Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline.

Smocovitis, V. B. (1992). Unifying biology: The evolutionary synthesis and evolutionary biology. Journal of the History of Biology, 25(1), 1–65.