The hole in the whale - The philosophy of biology
Wolfgang Wickler, Spectrum of Science, June 2004 From the point of view of philosophy, it is biology that is the scientific stumbling block, not physics. A philosopher can come to terms with the clear physical laws, even make friends with them. But even physicists like Richard Feynman, and, spiritually nourished by them, parts of the science-consuming public, see a gap between the so-called exact natural sciences and biology. According to Feynman - and many other physicists - the aim of every natural science is to predict what will happen in an experiment that has never been carried out; he even claims that everything that living things do can be explained by their being composed of atoms that behave according to the laws of physics. But a system, especially a living one, consists not only of its parts, but essentially of the interaction of these parts. On higher levels of integration, "emergent" properties arise that cannot be derived from knowledge of the components of lower levels. For Ernst Mayr, probably the greatest living evolutionary biologist and the most important thought partner in this book, this is a fundamental characteristic of the organic world. The journalist Christian Göldenboog ("Süddeutsche Zeitung" and "Philosophy Today") attempts to clarify the role of biology in the philosophy of science. Science here (obviously?) means natural science. Scientists addicted to world formulas would not like to touch the whole of biology - with its insufficiently concrete laws, the constant innovations through evolution and learning ability as well as the sometimes absurd quirks of partner choice under sexual selection - but would prefer not to touch it at all. If biology contains genetic programs but no universal laws, is it a real science at all? Well, at least it's independent of the physical sciences. Ernst Mayr measures this by the fact that no revolutionary physical theory has resulted in any change in a biological theory. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, wrote the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky; if you replace "evolution" with "law of gravitation" or "relation of indeterminacy", the sentence becomes nonsensical. Above all, Göldenboog poked fun at the special problem of evolution, using the example of the origin of species and molecular biology in detail. And he then highlights biology as the new leading science, in the form of partly verbal, partly virtual conversations with a physicist, a population geneticist, an evolutionary geneticist, a sociobiologist, and finally with Ernst Mayr. The different ways of thinking and arguing, from which an overall picture of biology must emerge, come out quite well. But before that happens, the reader can look at parts of this overall picture through various subject-specific windows, and he sometimes has to think hard. One advantage for him is that the author of the book had to familiarize himself with this complex subject and can thus easily understand the situation of the reader. However, where Mr. Göldenboog falters, even a keenly thinking reader remains at a loss. It is true that a helper can use his own genes if these are also in the person in need; the probability of this increases with the degree of relationship. But when it comes to the question on whose account this benefit is to be booked (the helper? the beneficiary? the common genes?), things get confused. In bees, sisters are more closely related than mother and daughter; thus more copies of one's own genes pass into the next generation when worker bees are sterile and are raising sisters. But this only has an evolutionary effect if these sisters do not remain sterile but become queens. And sons, who are 100% related to their mother and sisters, should definitely care, but don't do it. Teleological reasoning, which has no place in the natural sciences, is condemned several times in the text, but then creeps in through a style of language that describes the result as a purpose: "If a species wants to survive, it needs ..." instead of " If a species survived, then it had..."; or "If the population is to remain the same in numbers..."; but should she? Not only biology students will discover a lot of interesting and stimulating things in the book and come across modern facets of a fascinating biology, in a wide range of schools of thought, from the double helix to extragalactic life. A philosophy of biology, which the subtitle of the book suggests, you will have to make of it yourself. A letter to the editor by PD Dr. Jürgen Schlitter, Bochum: In his book review, Professor Wickler reports the opinion that biology is "at least independent of the physical sciences". You could see that as a definition: of the great project of understanding the structures and processes of life, biology is just the part that doesn't need physics. However, there is a large number of physiologists, biochemists and biophysicists as well as physical chemists who use physical equipment and theory to clarify biological questions. Even more, they are only satisfied when they succeed in explaining and understanding a phenomenon physically. Doesn't understanding mean the aha experience that a single finding suddenly fits into the world view that has already been experienced as correct? In biology, chemical insight often conveys this experience, and the physically literate even becomes aware of the underlying network of physical laws that constitutes the coherence of our natural sciences.
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