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The Notion of Scientific Knowledge in Biology

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Abstract

The purpose of this work is to reconsider and critically discuss the conceptual foundations of modern biology and bio-sciences in general, and provide an epistemological guideline to help framing the teaching of these disciplines and enhancing the quality of their presentation in High School, Master and Ph.D. courses. After discussing the methodological problems that arise in trying to construct a sensible and useful scientific approach applicable to the study of living systems, we illustrate what are the general requirements that a workable scheme of investigation should meet to comply with the principles of the Galilean method. The amazing success of basic physics, the Galilean science of election, can be traced back to the development of a radically “reductionistic” approach in the interpretation of experiments and a systematic procedure tailored on the paradigm of “falsifiability” aimed at consistently incorporating new information into extended models/theories. The development of bio-sciences seems to fit with neither reductionism (the deeper is the level of description of a biological phenomenon the more difficult looks finding general and simple laws), nor falsifiability (not always experiments provide a yes-or-no answer). Should we conclude that biology is not a science in the Galilean sense? We want to show that this is not so. Rather in the study of living systems, the novel interpretative paradigm of “complexity” has been developed that, without ever conflicting with the basic principles of physics, allows organizing ideas, conceiving new models and understanding the puzzling lack of reproducibility that seems to affect experiments in biology and in other modern areas of investigation. In the delicate task of conveying scientific concepts and principles to students as well as in popularising bio-sciences to a wider audience, it is of the utmost importance for the success of the process of learning to highlight the internal logical consistency of biology and its compliance with the fundamental laws of physics.

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Notes

  1. See also the collection of papers in Bertelle et al. (2009) and the many references given there, as well as the work of Badii and Politi (1997).

  2. Further information can be found on the official website of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education http://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/services/online-materials/publications.html.

  3. Before entering the heart of the paper, in this note we would like to comment on the frequently asked question of whether and to what extent in scientific articles the information available in the Internet can be used. The issue is becoming more and more relevant as, along the years, more and more (useful) information is deposited, organized and made publicly and freely available to an ever growing audience of “internauts” (a blend of the words “Internet” and “astronaut”, according to the definition given by the Oxford Dictionary). In a nutshell the question is that, besides trustworthy websites (like the official websites of internationally recognized scientific or political organizations), there is a plethora of unofficial, most often untrustworthy sites. It is not always easy to distinguish the former from the latter. Then there is Wikipedia with all its goods and bads.

       As Internet users and, even more, as intellectuals and scientists, we cannot avoid confronting ourselves with the problem posed by the reliability and the stability of the enormous amount of data collected on the web, if one decides to make use of them. Without pretending to propose a general rule valid in any circumstances and for any user, our line of behaviour in this work was to make use and refer to information made available on the Internet only by internationally recognized scientific and political Institutions, like Universities or EMBL, NCBI, CERN, UNESCO, etc.

       In our opinion the case of Wikipedia needs a separate discussion because Wikipedia is an amazing example of an anarchic endeavour targeting the impossible task of summarizing and making available, besides mere, every-day information, also most of the body of human knowledge. The bad of Wikipedia is that there is no structured Authority that can guarantee the quality of the collected data, the good of it is that there is, however, a diffuse, democratic community of active users that restlessly checks what it is written, improves texts and corrects mistakes. Thus our attitude towards Wikipedia will be to either quote what we consider reliable sites as they give full reference to the original literature, or provide an explanation of why we need to resort to Wikipedia.

  4. As argued in the works of the Ayala school (Ayala and Arp 2009; Avise and Ayala 2007), three different types of reductionism, methodological, epistemological and ontological, can be identified. The Galilean reductionism on which physics is based and to which we are referring in this paper is of the methodological type.

  5. Of course one should not exaggerate in this direction. If the focus is the study of real motion on Earth, one cannot forget that without dry friction a wheel cannot roll and a car cannot move, without fluid friction a plane cannot fly and a sailboat cannot sail!

  6. For an accessible english translation, see Popper (2005).

  7. We are dealing here with energies of the order of the “Planck energy” \(E_{P}=c^2 \sqrt{{\hbar c}/{G}} \simeq 1.22 \times 10^{19}\,{\text{ GeV }} \simeq 1.96 \times 10^{9}\, {\text{ J }}\), where c is the speed of light in vacuum, G the gravitational constant, and \(\hbar \) the (reduced) Planck constant. For comparison we recall that the highest energy attainable at the Large Hadron Collider (LCH) at CERN is \(10^{15}\) times smaller.

  8. Calaprice (2005) denotes this sentence not as an exact quotation, but as a translation of a paraphrase of an Einstein’s sentence “Keine noch so grösse Zahl von Experimenten kann beweisen, dass ich recht habe; ein einziges Experiment kann beweisen, dass ich unrecht habe” as reported in (Einstein 2002).

  9. We refrain to call it “complexitism”, a neologism derived from the word ‘complexity”, just like “reductionism” originated from “reduction”, as it is done in certain contexts.

  10. For a quick overview of the SM see, for instance, the websites

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model_%28mathematical_formulation%29

    where reference to the original literature can be found. Given the complexity of the conceptual and mathematical structure of the SM of elementary particle, we decided to provide to the interested reader reference to the SM by quoting these two Internet links that in our opinion offer an accurate summary of its formulation also accessible to non-experts. For the more technically oriented reader a full, rigorous and complete presentation can be found in (Weinberg 2000).

  11. “Ideas without content are empty, experiences without the abstraction are blind”, E. Kant “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”.

  12. The existence of a natural tree structure, or in other words the possibility for a class to be further subdivided in smaller classes or for new wider classes to be build by putting together several classes, is a peculiar feature of complex systems. We will come back to this important point later.

  13. We stress that, as remarked in the previous section, this way of speaking is rather imprecise as complexity is more rigorously a property of a class of objects. Nevertheless, for short in the following we will refer to “single” systems as “complex”.

  14. This number is only indicative, and perhaps somewhat underestimated. The only place where one can find an estimate of it is the Google website http://www.geek.com/tag/Google-Books/. We dare to refer to Google as a source of information because for the argument that follows only the crude order of magnitude is important.

  15. What we mean here is that at this moment we are looking at the correlations among the characters of the sequence that give rise to words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, … , and not, say, at the arrangements of atoms that give rise to the symbols we see on the page or on the screen of a computer.

  16. See the official University website

    http://www.library.illinois.edu/learn/intro/organization.html/.

  17. Without entering here into the details of the various existing classification methods, we refer the reader to the website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_classification that to our knowledge is the only place where one can find a comprehensive list and description of the many existing classification methods of written documents.

  18. For a self-contained presentation of the subject see Mézard et al. (1987).

  19. See for further information the 2014 SNPs classification and catalog of the official NCBI websites

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/pipermail/dbsnp-announce/2014q4/000147.html

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/SNP/snp_summary.cgi?build_id=142.

  20. Computers are complicated systems with no redundancy. Perhaps this is the reason why they break down so often and are so bold!

  21. The panels shown in Fig. 12 have been elaborated by the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) and extracted from the official PDB website (Berman et al. 2000).

  22. The plan of sequencing the whole human genome started in 1984. The Human Genome Project international consortium was funded in 1990. The full sequencing was declared completed in April 2003. A working draft of the genome was announced in 2000 and the papers describing it were published in February 2001 by the Human Genome Project consortium (Shoemaker et al. 2001) as well as by the private Celera Genomics company (Venter et al. 2001) that was launched in 1998.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy

    Silvia Morante & Giancarlo Rossi

  2. INFN, Sezione di Roma 2, Via della Ricerca Scientifica, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Silvia Morante & Giancarlo Rossi

  3. Centro Fermi - Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche E. Fermi, Compendio del Viminale, Piazza del Viminale 1, 00184, Rome, Italy

    Giancarlo Rossi

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Correspondence to Silvia Morante.

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Morante, S., Rossi, G. The Notion of Scientific Knowledge in Biology. Sci & Educ 25, 165–197 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-015-9803-5

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