Abstract
Defining the operative ideology of the biological sciences is in the midst of re-assessment. Confidence in the chemo-mechanical reductive model is in continued debate, and the issue appears to focus on the organism, which has fallen between two seemingly crushing spheres of thought—molecular/cellular biology, on the one hand, and behavioral/ecological biology, on the other. As a physician, I participate in this discussion with the least well-defined discipline at his calling. Medicine at the end of the 20th century relies on contributions from technology, physics, chemistry, psychology as integral to its practice as the biological sciences. As a result, we do not possess a well-defined theory of medicine, a self-contained system of its own principles, by which it exclusively pursues expansion of its knowledge base or regulates its intellectual and practical activities. It borrows from everywhere, and in the process appears as a patchwork quilt, in places highly developed and precisely effective, and in others, painfully devoid of any reasonable hypothesis or therapy [1]. Success in areas amenable to mechanical models (i.e. orthopedics, cardiovascular surgery) or military metaphor (antimicrobial therapy) has been staggering. But such principles are not necessarily applicable to more complex systems based on hierarchical construction, such as the immune or nervous systems, or in developing strategies against cancer or AIDS.
“If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.” Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
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References
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The most famous example was the concept of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, viz. the “Meckel-Serres Law”. Here the same laws regulate embryonic development and historical progression of species, von Baer rigorously attacked this formulation as the leading teleomechanist of his day.
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To argue that the parts were meaningful only in relation to the whole is a far different concept from von Baer’s position that the whole is ontologically primary and directs the organization of its parts (an Aristotelian version). Consistent with Kant, Schwann excluded “any sort of directive agent from discussion of biological organization” (Lenoir, p. 129). Liebig and Lotze joined Schwann as third generation teleomechanists who sought to purge vitalism as a propagating life force. Teleology in their hands was to remain a program to investigate the whole, looking at the parts in view of defining and understanding function. In 1842, Liebig (Liebig, J. Die organische Chemie in iker Anwendung auf Physiologie und Pathologie. Braunschweig, 1842.), and Lotze (Lotze, H. “Lebenskraft”, Handworterbuch der Physiologie. Vol. 1 ed. R. Wagner. Gottingen, 1842.) published their seminal works: Lotze clearly enuniciated his position: teleology does not offer an explanation, but serves as a regulative principle of inquiry, which serves to promote the investigation as to how the organized body functions. In this view, forces were not to be treated as independent beings, e.g. like other material objects (another focus of assault on Naturphilosophie). Similarly, Liebig attacked vitalism by regarding all forces in the organic body (chemical, electrical, etc) as particular manifestations of motion that could ultimately be expressed in terms of momentum and work. Each regarded the process of material exchange in the animal as the central issue, and heat was thought as the crucial element in the interconversion of the various forces. The reductionists focused on the same research program, but with a broadened agenda. To establish the conservation and conversion of energy in organic processes was not only to deny a vitalistic element, but also to establish the ultimate reducibility of organic function to physics and chemistry; this strategy was successfully employed by Helmholtz, who shed the teleological construct, and whose brillant experimental success must be viewed as directly linked to the eventual eclipse of the teleomechanistic program.
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Surveys of this problem have recently been published: Self organizing systems. The Emergence of Order. Edited by FE Yates, A Garfinkel, DO Walter, and GB Yates. New York: Plenum Press, 1987 and Artificial Life: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living System. C.F. Langton (ed.). Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1989.
A celebrated exception is the case of several physicists who turned to biology in the 1930’s and 40’s as a result of the philosophical challenge presented by the writings of Erwin Schrodinger (What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press, 1944) and Niels Bohr (Light and Life, Nature 131: 421–423, 457–459, 1933. See also related papers in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. II and III. Woodbridge, Conn., Ox Bow Press, 1987). One well-examined example (E.P. Fischer and C. Lipson Thinking About Science: Max Delbrück and the Origins of Molecular Biology. New York: WW Norton and Co., 1988) is that of Max Delbrück, who sought to establish (in bacterial genetics) Bohr’s notion that a complementary explanation to physics and chemistry existed in biological systems, i.e. organic function could not be ultimately explained by reductive sciences. It is of note that by the early 1960’s Bohr although asserting the crucial role of teleology in biology, had become more respectful of the reductionist approach.
Surely, as long as for practical or epistemological reasons one speaks of life, such teleological terms will be used in complementing the terminology of molecular biology. This circumstance, however, does not in itself imply any limitation in the application to biology of the well-established principles of atomic physics. [Niels Bohr, Light and Life revisited (address given June, 1962; unfinished manuscript, Philosophical Writings, Vol. Ill, op. cit., p. 26].
Delbriick’s own musings on these issues are discussed in “A physicist’s renewed look at Biology: Twenty years later”. Science 168: 1312–1315, 1970; “Light and Life III”. Carlsberg Research Communications. 41: 299–309, 1976, and Mind from Matter. An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology. Palo Alto: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1986.
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For example, the success of gene control and lambda phage molecular biology as a paradigm for eukaryote gene regulation is a particularly exciting chapter in the power of reductionist biology (see Mark Ptashne, A Genetic Switch. Cambridge: Cell Press, 1987), and for a summary of gene regulation at the mRNA level, see Marilyn Kozach, A profusion of controls, J. Cell. Biol. 107: 1–7, 1988.
As I have examined reductionism and the role it has played in science — in biology particularly—I have found that it has served primarily as a program or a policy; it has not served really, for the biologist, as a rule or law. The biologist might like to think of it as such, but more often than not he has used reductionism as a means of advocating a research strategy, of delineating what to him seems to be an acceptable type of explanation for the biological sciences. [Mendelsohn, E. Commentary, Part I. Conference on Explanation in Biology: Historical. Philosophical, and Scientific aspects. J. Hist. Biol. 2: 135–140, 1969, p. 139.]
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Coleridge ST. Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life. London: John Chruchill, 1848. Apropos this dialectical issue, there are some uncanningly pre-Whiteheadian statements in this monograph: But to form the first conception of a real thing, we state both as one in the idea, duration….or the oneness of space and time, is the predicate of all real being…. But as little can we conceive the oneness, except as the mid-point producing itself on each side; that is, manifesting itself on two opposite poles. Thus, from identity we derive duality, and from both together we obtain polarity, synthesis, indifference, predominance…. (p. 53).
That Coleridge can be so easily linked to Whitehead, simply re-emphasizes the affinity Whitehead had for the Romantic (as acknowledged in his debt to Wordsworth). What I find of particular interest is the strong dialectical component, the polarity and synthesis in Nature that so marked Naturphilosophie and so profoundly influenced Coleridge, and then re-emerged in Whitehead’s metaphysics, albeit in a refracted form.
In a sense, Naturphilosophie can be viewed as one among many forms in which Romanticism manifested itself. It was perhaps, as one commentator put it, merely—one extreme systematization [Snelders, HAM Inorganic natural sciences 1797–1840: An introductory survey. Studies in Romanticism 9: 193–215, 1970, p. 195.] of Romantic ideas. [Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Tallahassee; Florida State Univ. Press, 1985, p. 141.]
For analysis of Theory of Life, see T.H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early 19th Century Science. Cambridge, 1981, pp. 42–45; 161–166; 215–219, and Coleridge’s “reactionary” influence on medicine and biology see A. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989.
David Guest in A Textbook of Dialectical Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1939) cites several attempts (e.g. H. Levy, Aspects of Dialectical Materialism, London: Watts and Co., 1934, J.B.S. Haldane, The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences. Freeport, N.Y. Books for Library, Press, 1939. Marcel Prenant Biology and Marxism translated by CD. Greaves, New York: International Publishers, 1943) at showing the relevance of dialectical materialism for biology “when he is not afraid of the social conclusions to be drawn from it” (p. 102). In fact, these studies, like virtually every treatment of the subject, are politically motivated and either are passionately supportive or rejecting it out of hand (i.e. Sidney Hook’s Dialectical Materialism and Scientific Method, Manchester: Committee of Science and Reason, 1955). A dispassionate assessment of dialectical thinking in biology, that would attempt to place dialectical materialism within its appropriate extra-Soviet context, is still required. In the context of our concern, dialectical is used in the sense used by E.S. Russell, without the embrace of Engel, whose political motivations were apparently overlooked by infatuated sympathizers like Joseph Needham: [Engel’s concept of nature as dialectical] was rightly directed against the static conceptions of the scientists of his time, who were unprepared for the mass of contradictions that science was about to have to deal with, and who did not appreciate that nature is full of apparently irreconcilable antagonisms and distinctions which are reconciled at higher organisational levels. [Needham, J. A Biologist’s view of Whitehead, in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The Library of Living Philosophers, ed. PA Schilpp. Menasha, Wisconsin: Banta Publishing Co., 1941, pp. 243–271.]
The sentiment is sympathetic, but the scientific contribution remains problematic.
Wetter, G.A. Dialectical Materialism. A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union. Translated by P. Heath. New York: Praeger, 1958.
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See the respective essays of Partricia Foster and Sahotra Sarkar in this volume.
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Tauber, A.I. (1991). Introduction: Speculations Concerning the Origins of the Self. In: Tauber, A.I. (eds) Organism and the Origins of Self. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 129. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3406-4_1
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