Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

11: The Scientific Method

The single most characteristic feature of science is that its conclusions are always tentative, ready to be overthrown by new observational evidence and new theories that more compactly, more elegantly, and/or more completely explain the evidence.

John L. Casti

It is scientifically unsound to make assumptions of the way things ought to be.

Michael Behe

We have come a long way in our narrative of the various manners in which evolution was and is interpreted. A mass of facts which science has discovered since the time of the first geologists and paleontologists supports the view of a gradual development of the life forms on our planet. According to this view evolution is the only reasonably sustainable scheme and explanation of our biological past. What remains very much in question is the understanding of the way it all happened, closely dependent on the interpretation of the nature of matter, life and mind. Stepping aside for a short while from the information provided by our story of the evolutionary theories, a look at some essential points may clarify the total picture.

The Scientific Method

‘The scientific method’ is the much praised way of practicing science which is supposed to have changed a medieval world into a technological one, because it enabled humanity to unveil the secrets of nature and to use this newly acquired knowledge for mastering nature. The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and friend of Richard Dawkins, wrote: “The invention of the scientific method is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful intellectual framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked.”¹

The all-important first attack took place during the axis time of the Renaissance. The authoritarian dogmas and superstitions of the Catholic Church were put to the test of reason by intellectuals who were reading the rediscovered ancient Greek and Latin authors, and who, inspired by them, launched the movement they called la nuova scienza. A decisive confrontation in this general attack was the trial of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition, lost by Galileo² but ultimately won by science.

As mentioned in one of the first chapters, Galileo’s premises would become the foundations of the revolutionary scientific method. His first premise, and the most important one, was that only matter and material things should be the object of science. This created, from the start, a gap between science on the one side, and religion, occultism and everything else on the other. How sharply this separation was felt by both sides is illustrated precisely by the Galileo Affair, the core of which was the justification of different worldviews. Matter could be directly experienced by the senses; life and mind – and the non-material worlds of occultism, religion and fantasy or superstition conjured by them – could not. The fundamental materialism of science, and its offhand dumping of all else, have become so common that at present to academic science and its popularization the world is wholly and exclusively material.

Galileo’s second premise was that science cannot handle wholes, it has to divide or reduce them into parts, consisting of smaller parts, consisting of still smaller parts: it is reductionist. This reductionism has been absolute in physical science since Galileo and Descartes, and was later on adopted by the biological sciences. A thing consists of parts; if we know all the parts and the parts of the parts, we know the whole. The ‘mystic’ view had always said the contrary, not that the parts explain the whole but that the whole explains the parts, and that the entire universe explains every single part of it, however large or little. “The “Universe is one. Its origin can only be the eternal unity. It is a vast organism in which the natural things find their harmony and reciprocal sympathy.” This view, called ‘holism’, is far from defunct and seems on the rise again, for a scientist of the stature of David Bohm has said: “It must always be remembered that, at a deeper level, attention must be given to the whole, which, in turn, acts to guide thought as it abstracts elements which do not in fact have a separate existence.”³ It is also this indelible intuition of the unity of all things that drives theoretical physics to continue its search for a Grand Unified Theory.

However, Richard Lewontin warns against “extreme holism” or “obscurantist holism.” Even if it is true that “the whole is always prior to its parts” and everything is interconnected, “that should not be confused with the methodological claim that no success at all in understanding the world or manipulating it is possible if we cut it up in any way. Such a strong methodological claim we know to be wrong as a matter of historical experience. Whatever the faults of reductionism, we have accomplished a great deal by employing reductionism as a methodological strategy,” wrote Lewontin recently.⁴ It is, after all, reductionist science that has made our world. Yet the increasing awareness that “we need much more comprehensive [i.e. holistic] and much less reductionist understanding” may be a sign of “a new sort of science which is being forged at the moment.” (Russell Stannard⁵)

The problem of the whole and its parts is a problem of the mind, and hence cannot be solved by science itself as it recognizes only matter. Science is an exercise of the mind, a mental activity – a blatant truth which is often negated or overlooked. “Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that [the given objects] are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole,” writes Sri Aurobindo. “For, even when it knows that they are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves, otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic activity.”⁶ This means that “a new sort of science” would have to be the child of a different kind of mind, one that can work with wholes and is not forced, because of its own constitution, to cut everything into parts.

Galileo’s third premise is that all changes in matter are brought about by external forces. Matter is dead, it has no internal life or internal dispositions to react. Moreover, internal actions and reactions, like those in animals and humans, cannot be determined quantitatively, they cannot be measured and represented by mathematical formulas. This tenet of the scientific method excludes from its field of examination an enormous part of phenomena essential to living organisms and to life itself. It leads unavoidably to the view that the whole of all living beings consists of material elements, which react to each other through external forces. The prime example of this view is the Cartesian metaphor of the machine.

Nothing in the universe exists by itself; everything is hierarchically interconnected with larger entities, to which it belongs, and with smaller entities, which are part of it. (Arthur Koestler gave the name “holon” to a thing in this multi-relationship.⁷) As the mind cannot grasp the totality even of the simplest thing in existence, it projects on it a simplification which makes the thing determinable and perhaps reconstructable. The metaphor of the machine is the consequence of the limited capacities of the mind.

A simple machine is evidently an artifact, but scientific materialism supposes that an ever increasing physical complexity will, at some undefined point, suddenly turn into a living organism. “The entire body of modern science rests on Descartes’ metaphor of the world as a machine, which he introduced in Part V of the Discourse on Method as a way of understanding organisms, but then generalized as a way of thinking about the entire universe,” writes Lewontin.⁸ In Descartes’ days automata that could perform amazing feats like gesturing, rolling their eyes or whistling, were all the rage. “Wandering through the Royal Gardens, Descartes was impressed by some water-driven robots and theorized that human and animal action was likewise a machine-like ‘reflex’.”⁹

“While we cannot dispense with metaphors in thinking about nature,” continues Lewontin, “there is a great risk of confusing the metaphor with the thing of real interest. We cease to see the world as if it were like a machine and take it to be a machine. The result is that the properties we ascribe to our object of interest and the questions we ask about it reinforce the original metaphorical image, and we miss the aspects of the system that do not fit the metaphorical approximation.”¹⁰ This is how the cell came to be called a machine (by Monod) and that animals, including humans, are called robots (by Dawkins). There are futurists who expect man-made robots, within half a century or so, to be living organisms.

All this follows from the third premise that in science only external forces are legitimate, at first sight an innocent statement but deadening in its effects. “The problem for biology is that the model of physics, held up as the paradigm for science, is not applicable because the analogues of mass, velocity, and distance do not exist for organisms. … Organisms move in a viscous medium; they suffer friction; they are too small and too distant from each other to interact gravitationally; their collisions are not elastic; their shapes, masses, and centers of gravity are changing; if they live in water they are buoyant; their paths are constantly being influenced by external and internal forces. The characteristic of a living object is that it reacts to external stimuli rather than being passively propelled by them,” writes Lewontin, who is a geneticist at Harvard University.¹¹

Science, as held by Galileo’s fourth premise, can only work with the primary qualities of things: extension, motion, and mass. Secondary qualities like colour, scent and taste are conditioned by the primary qualities. Like all elaborate mental formations, the scientific method is an instrument, a set of mental formulations which fit more or less together as a whole, and which apply to a certain aspect of ‘objective’ reality. The primary qualities aforementioned are the ones the scientific method can handle. The secondary qualities, sometimes called ‘qualia’, escape its examining grip and are therefore considered of minor importance. Again, the division in primary and secondary qualities was necessary to enable any science to be done at all. But, again, this division has impoverished the world in which we live, reducing it as it were to black and white, this in total contradiction with our experience.

Galileo’s fifth premise says that the language of science is mathematics, using the data of measurement. To quote his own words from Il Saggiatore: “Philosophy is written in that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe; but it cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.”¹² The importance of this step can only be realized when weighing it against the science of the medieval scholastics, which was mainly rhetorical verbosity and sophistry, a mental juggling game in the void with quotations from ancient authors and references as “proofs” from the Bible, the Church Fathers, and dozens of other mostly contradictory sources.

The last premise had perhaps the most direct influence on the founding of la nuova scienza: all guesses, theses, or theories have to be tested as to their truth and reality. It was the authentic, innate need of truth that, after centuries of theological, philosophical and pseudo-scientific fiction, led to the rule of the experiment as an absolute precondition for the acceptance of any idea, thesis or theory. “Correctness is more likely to be obtained by the experimental method than by any other process,” writes Lewontin.¹³ Richard Feynman put it as follows: “In general we look for a new law by the following process. First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is: if it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”¹⁴

Experimentation became the norm during the birth period of the modern sciences. William Gilbert (1544-1613), in his great book on magnetism De Magnete, was one of the first “to set out clearly in print the essence of the scientific method: the testing of hypotheses by rigorous experiments.” Realdus Columbus, Vesalius’ successor as professor of anatomy in Padua, told his students: “Try the experiment and find out whether what I have said agrees with the thing itself.” (Formerly, anatomy lessons consisted mainly in reading passages from Galen as comments by dissections.) William Harvey (1578-1657), who discovered the circulation of the blood, wrote: “I do not profess to learn and teach anatomy from the axioms of the philosophers, but [directly] from dissections and from the fabrick of nature.” This experimental approach was enthusiastically espoused by the Royal Society, and firmly established, well before the end of the seventeenth century, as the scientific method.”¹⁵

Is There a Scientific Method?

To ask this question after the matter discussed in the previous section may seem nonsensical. Yet, Isabelle Stengers sounds a first warning: “Every science has its own methods which cannot be applied without precautions to other sciences. Moreover, the methods evolve within the same science. To speak of the experimental method of physics or biology is omitting to take into account the evolution of the practices and the kinds of argumentation proper to each particular period, country, or even [scientific] institution.”¹⁶ Henry Bauer, in his Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, goes at it more directly: “The scientific method is a myth, it does not explain the success of science, and scientists in practice do not follow the method.”¹⁷

Science, writes Bauer, “begins by chance and caprice, at the frontier, with hardly a shadow of the scientific method in evidence,” after which it is “sieved, tested and modified until it appears in the textbooks.” This sieving and testing happens in the course of the procedure of trying to have a new idea or discovery accepted by the community of scientists. First there is the writing of a paper expounding the idea; then the paper must be submitted to one of the numerous publications in the discipline, where it is reviewed by a jury of senior scientists called ‘peers’; if the peers find the idea interesting and the authors of the paper are lucky, it will be published. More luck may bring the paper – one in a stream of hundreds which are continually published – to the attention of the scientific community. If the new idea is accepted, it may be integrated into the discipline’s reigning paradigm and perhaps in the general scientific paradigm. After having negotiated all these hurdles, the new idea may be included in the text books, the ultimate consecration, and spread through academia.

“The ubiquity of intuition in science can scarcely be overlooked,” writes John Ziman, confirming that “science begins by chance and caprice.”¹⁸ It is true that in most cases the intuition is the spark made possible by the tension of much reflection or experimenting. Newton’s apple is a well-known example; whether a real event or legend, it certainly tells of an instant illumination. We have seen how Wallace’s theory of evolution came to him “in a sudden flash of insight” during a bout of fever on a tropical island. August Kekulé ‘saw’ the structure of the benzene ring, the key to organic chemistry, while dozing. Descartes had his three dreams in a similar condition; they were the call to his vocation and the occult instigation of his philosophy of rationalism. Mendeleyev’s fundamental insight of the periodic table of elements came also to him in a dream.

Albert Einstein narrated: “The breakthrough came suddenly one day. I was sitting in a chair in my patent office in Bern. Suddenly the thought struck me: If a man falls freely, he does not feel his own weight. I was taken aback. This simple thought experiment made a deep impression on me. This led me to the theory of gravity.”¹⁹ For Watson and Crick, co-discoverers of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, “the penny dropped, a moment of great insight.” “At three o’clock one morning, lying sleeplessly on his bed in a small hostel, Werner Heisenberg knew that he had the tool enabling him to perform calculations in his new [quantum] mechanics. So he rose from his bed and started figuring. In his feverish state he made endless slips and errors and had to start over again and again. But finally he got an answer, and it was more than he could have dreamed for. What he had found was a gift from above, he thought, a discovery of unwarranted and unexpected proportions.”²⁰

These examples must suffice, but it seems that hardly any important theoretical discovery is the end product of an effort of logical reasoning: most discoveries, and certainly the important ones, are the consequence of a sudden illumination. The same conclusion could be drawn from the history of biological and technological research. The way Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin will readily come to mind, but Royston Roberts has filled a volume with “accidental discoveries in science” and called it Serendipity. Scientism attacks with disdain all forms of irrationality on every possible occasion. Yet, strange to say, it has no explanation for the phenomenon of rational consciousness, which it supposes to be a material “activity of neurons in the central nervous system;” and the history of science is a succession of irrational illuminations without which neither science nor scientism would exist.

“What has been presented as the scientific method, at any given time, has been a simplified snapshot of an intrinsically much more opportunistic enterprise,” writes Piet Hut, the Dutch astronomer. “The strength of science is not at all in its currently accepted method. The strength is the fact that scientists allow the method to change.”²¹ And Lewis Wolpert concludes his enquiry among fellow scientists thus: “Many famous scientists have given advice [to their younger colleagues]: try many things; do what makes your heart leap; think big; dare to explore where there is no light; challenge expectation; cherchez le paradoxe; be sloppy so that something unexpected happens, but not so sloppy that you can’t tell what happened; turn it on its head; never try to solve a problem until you can guess the answer; precision encourages the imagination; seek simplicity; seek beauty … One could do no better than to try them all. No one method, no paradigm, will capture the process of science. There is no such thing as the scientific method.”²²

The problem of the scientific method, especially in biology, becomes clearer if one realizes that the Galilean premises are relevant to material objects. Material objects have no internal reactions and are moved by impacts of external forces. If the external circumstances remain the same, a material objects will not change; therefore it can be counted, measured and weighed. But, as Lewontin remarks, first, in nature external circumstances never remain the same, and, second, “the characteristic of a living object is that it reacts to external stimuli rather than being passively propelled by them.”²³ “Scientific laws only give a schematic account of material process of Nature – as a valid scheme they can be used for reproducing or extending at will a material process, but obviously they cannot give an account of the thing itself,” writes Sri Aurobindo,²⁴ and certainly not of a living organism.

“… We live in the surface mind of ignorance, do not know what is going on behind and see only the phenomenal process of Nature. There the apparent fact is an overwhelming determinism of Nature and as our surface consciousness is part of that process, we are unable to see the other term of the biune reality. For practical purposes, on the surface there is an entire determinism in Matter – though this is now disputed by the latest school of Science [at the time of writing quantum mechanics]: As Life emerges a certain plasticity sets in, so that it is difficult to predict anything as exactly as one predicts material things that obey a rigid law.”²⁵ And the plasticity increases with the growth of Mind.

Parading the Paradigm

While reading Aristotle’s Physics Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, also had his illumination. “During that moment Kuhn saw – he knew! – that reality is ultimately unknowable; any attempt to describe it obscures as much as it illuminates.”²⁶ The result of this ‘epiphany’ was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962. According to Steve Fuller it is “the most influential book on the nature of science in the second half of the 20th century – and arguably, the entire 20th century.”²⁷ John Horgan expresses the opinion that it “may be the most influential treatise ever written on how science does (or does not) proceed.”²⁸

It was this revolutionary book which caused the indiscriminate use of the buzzword ‘paradigm’, applied as well to the political strategy of a presidential candidate as to a new formation of a football team. “A paradigm is an accepted model or pattern,” writes Kuhn, making it at first look quite simple and innocent. As he further defines the term, paradigms are “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners … By choosing this term, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research. … A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm.”²⁹

In science, a paradigm is the commonly accepted interpretation of the universe, nature or reality by the practitioners of a scientific discipline. For instance, there is the Aristotelian view of the universe and there is the Newtonian view – both very different from the view of the ancient Chinese or the American Indians, who had their own kind of science. To Aristotle the Earth was the centre of the universe and all heavenly bodies turned around it. The Earth was stable but corruptible in its elements, the heavenly bodies were neither. Aristotle had an explanation for all phenomena perceived in that universe (the planets moved on crystalline spheres pushed forward by angels), and his model was the standard and even obligatory one in the Western world till Copernicus taught differently. To Isaac Newton the Earth was no longer the centre of the universe. His calculations proved that the solar system functioned like a clockwork mechanism, and that it was gravity which held the system together and moved the planets. What gravity was remained a mystery, but the calculations fitted the perceived movements of the bodies. Newtonian physics were universally recognized till replaced by the paradigm of Einsteinian relativity.

The substitution of the Aristotelian worldview by the Copernican was the background of the controversy between the Catholic Church and Galileo. Newton’s clockwork universe was violently opposed, one of the reasons being the force of gravity which, like magic, worked at a distance. All new paradigms (including Kuhn’s) have been systematically opposed by the proponents of the established ones. Why? Because a new paradigm has to conquer the minds and hearts of the scientific community and its acceptance is as traumatic as a religious or political conversion. “The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience.”³⁰ The reigning paradigm, during the time of its validity, is the truth; a different idea puts this truth into question and is therefore considered rebellious and unorthodox, or absurd, or plain stupid. In these matters science at times does not differ from religion, but is as dogmatic and aggressive – and so are the fundamental political systems, a fact abundantly illustrated by the history of communism. To accept a new paradigm “the scientist’s perception of his environment must be re-educated,”³¹ he must learn to see the same facts differently, and to perceive new facts which he did not perceive before although they were there.

Essential to the understanding of these attitudes is the working of the human mind and its activities, be they scientific, religious, or political. The function of the mind “is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyze the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its own fashion, know.”³² The construction of a new paradigm demands a huge, life-changing mental effort, putting together a considerable number of newly interpreted facts discovered by reflection, calculation and research. To arrive at accepting such a new mental formation – the process of conversion – takes time and demands an effort which cannot be repeated in one human life. For scientists, this effort means also the work of a lifetime, abandoning which would mean erasing years of work, prestige and self-esteem. This is one of the reasons why a given paradigm is always defended with all possible means and even against reasonable arguments.

It is also the explanation of the fact that the practitioners of a scientific specialty must be “professionally initiated.” “Professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid.”³³ Science becomes as dogmatic as a religious church or a totalitarian political system. It becomes irrational. “By losing its hypothetical character to become an unshakable dogma, the dominant theory [i.e. the paradigm] takes on the aspect of a myth.”³⁴ “Is there any defence against the charge that the whole scientific paradigm is a self-sustained delusion?” asks John Ziman. “The scientists in our model are almost always deliberately trained to a particular attitude to natural phenomena. How are their intellectual constructs to be distinguished from those of any other self-accrediting social group, such as a religious sect? What reason have we for preferring the scientific paradigm as the ideal, unique world picture?” The institutions where scientists are educated and trained provide “the brainwashing implicit in the long process of becoming technically expert.”³⁵ They are no longer temples of science, but of scientism.

All this may explain why Thomas Kuhn’s essay on the formation of scientific paradigms and their eventual replacement was so vigorously opposed. Science, in his view, is not constant progress towards the discovery of the ultimate truth; it consists of islands of partial truth, held to be absolute for a limited period, after which, in a kind of mental volcanic eruptions, they will disappear and new islands will be formed, perhaps to join a small archipelago of still surviving ones. “Theory is preconceived belief,” writes Henry Bauer.³⁶ He could have written “hardened belief.”

A fierce controversy developed between Kuhn, the other prominent philosopher of science Karl Popper, and their adherents. For Popper there was an absolute Truth or Reality which science step by step discovered, although the correctness of scientific formulas could never be proved but only disproved or “falsified.” For Kuhn, even if there is an absolute Reality, it can never be known by science; only mental conceptions, artificially composed images of it, are what science is able to accomplish. The root of the problem is, again, the human mind. “We regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches itself from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge it; for so it seems and therefore is to our all-dividing, all-analyzing mentality. The first business of mind is to render ‘discrete’, to make fissures much more than to discern, and so it has made this paralyzing fissure between thought and reality.” (Sri Aurobindo³⁷)

The impact of Kuhn’s insight on the understanding of the role of science has been enormous. It is the cause why at present one reads statements like the following by Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and of the history of science: “Today physics marches on not so much via proofs as through the persuasive coherency of the picture it presents. What passes for truth in science is a comprehensive pattern of interconnected answers to questions posed to nature – explanations of how things work (efficient causes), though not necessarily why they work (final causes).”³⁸ The certitudes of scientism have become relative.

Biology and Physics

If there is a date which may be pinpointed as the start of the modern scientific revolution, it is 1543. This date will be readily recognized as the year of the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium. It is less commonly known that, by a wonderful coincidence, it is also the publication date of the magnificently illustrated book De Humani Corporis Fabrica (about how the human body is made) by the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius.³⁹ Thus the gates of two parallel terrains of scientific exploration opened at the same time, but physics, supported by mathematics, would advance like a speedy hare while the biological sciences, in comparison, would be the proverbial tortoise.

As just narrated, physics had invented the trick to reduce all things under its consideration to matter, to dead objects. Biology found itself unable to exert a similar strong and clearly definable grasp on the subjects under its consideration, which were living organisms. A dead bird does not move unless moved, a living bird flies away of itself. In the 1660s, when the main works of Galileo, Kepler and Descartes had been published and Newton was already working on his grand synthesis, “European medical knowledge and teaching were in a state of flux. New anatomical and physiological discoveries such as the circulation of the blood had undermined confidence in the tradition of Aristotle and Galen without necessarily replacing it with anything more coherent or effective. … Medicine remained in a pre-scientific state …”⁴⁰

Unable to invent a method to study living organism scientifically, biologists of all disciplines turned toward the successful sister-science: physics. “Emerging more than a century after modern physics, biology saw itself challenged by the scientific criteria of its elder sister. On the one hand the biologists could profit from the experience of their colleagues in physics; on the other the presence of a science in full expansion invited the biologists to imitate its methods, supposing that they would warrant the success of their own enterprise.”⁴¹

“A key ambition of the scientific revolution was to provide numerical, objective descriptions of all aspects of the universe, including living and anatomical phenomena,” writes Matthew Cobb. He quotes the Italian anatomist Francesco Redi: “I wished to demonstrate in these dissertations that unless myology [the study of the muscles] becomes part of mathematics, the parts of the muscles cannot be distinctly designated nor can their movement be successfully studied.”⁴²

The efforts by the biologists to go beyond Aristotle and Galen, the two medieval authorities on all things biological, were admirable. Most of their names have been forgotten, although they deserve better. Niels Steno, Reinier de Graaf, Jan Swammerdam, Johannes van Horne, and many others, were masters who travelled through Europe, and studied and taught in all high places of medicine: Leiden, Padua, Montpellier, Paris. To them we own much of the knowledge of our own bodies and those of our evolutionary relatives. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in continuous correspondence with the newly founded Royal Society, demonstrated the wonders of the microscope. The process of animal procreation was discovered. Life and its miracles seemed within the reach of understanding and imitation.

Common to all of them was the new scientific method of the experiment and a real enthusiasm for it. The new method was based on rationalism, logic, and scepticism towards all traditional theories, in most cases not better than invention and fancy. From that time onwards biology suffered from what has been called ‘physics envy’, caused by the fact that physics progressed on the basis of rational proof and the logic of mathematics, while biology remained confronted with the complexity of the organism, its characteristics of reproduction and alimentation, and behind it all the mysterious, scientifically untreatable force of life. Vitalism, the acceptance of the reality of such a life force, kept and keeps raising its head. Around 1900 it became, with figures like Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch, a widespread and outspoken movement. It has systematically been condemned by academic biologists as mysticism, animism or occultism.

Richard Dawkins proclaims: “Everything ultimately obeys the laws of physics.”⁴³ We know of the ambition of his fellow sociobiologist Edward Wilson to make biology into the one foundation and explanation of the universe, his kind of Grand Unified Theory. “Wilson’s sociobiology is an attempt to make evolutionary biology a total quantitative and predictive science.” (Ullica Segerstråle⁴⁴) “Biology is nothing but chemistry, and chemistry is nothing but physics,” states Robin Dunbar.⁴⁵ Francis Crick agrees: “It is indeed the goal of modern biological research to make the whole of biology understandable in the way physics and chemistry are formulated.”⁴⁶ This results in the following sentences from a recent book to teach biology: “The living cells with which biology is concerned can be reduced to the chemical compounds of which they are made and then further reduced to the constituent atoms, which follow the laws of physics. Thus, in this approach, although the human body is complex, its operations can ultimately be analyzed in terms of the universal laws of physics.”⁴⁷

What seems to have escaped ‘orthodox’ present-day biology, however, is that the physics it envies is that of the nineteenth century, and that since Einstein and especially since the birth of quantum mechanics physics has gone off in very different directions. “So we are now in the very strange position that whereas physicists are implying that, fundamentally and in totality, inanimate matter is not mechanical, molecular biologists are saying that whenever matter is organized so as to be alive, it is completely mechanical,” reflects Mary Midgley, a philosopher who made her voice heard in the sociobiological debate.⁴⁸ “It is one of the greatest ironies of our century,” wrote Michael Talbot in the 1990s, “that as reductionist biologists were slowly trying to purge all mention of consciousness from their understanding of neurophysiological processes, physicians were at the same time uncovering compelling evidence that the mind is not only necessary, but may be integral to our understanding of the physical universe.”⁴⁹

“The problem for biology is that the model of physics, held up as the paradigm for science, is not applicable because the analogies of mass, velocity and distance do not exist for organisms.” (Lewontin⁵⁰) The classical machine model fails in biology. A material molecule cannot become alive or conscious; material parts joined together in whatever way do not become a living organism. In physics causal claims are generally based on the precondition that all elements of the experimental system remain equal, “but in biology all other things are almost never equal.” (Lewontin) Each snowflake has a configuration that depends on its distinctive history. And we recall Lewontin’s words, that “the characteristic of a living being is that it reacts to external stimuli rather than being passively propelled by them.”

In this context the terse statement of Ernst Mayr, a founder of neo-Darwinism, deserves to be mentioned: “All so-called evolutionary laws are contingent [i.e. accidental, random] generalizations … with numerous exceptions, and are quite different from the universal laws of physics.” And he quotes Bernhard Rensch, another architect of neo-Darwinism: “Evolutionary ‘laws’ are greatly restricted in time and place and therefore do not satisfy the traditional definitions of scientific laws.”⁵¹ So we find, firstly, that physics and biology are quite different fields of scientific study and experimentation which call for their own kind of laws; secondly, that evolution, the general object of our exploration, is historical, a sequence of one-time events, each of them particular and never exactly repeated. A law cannot be the general abstract description of single, one-time events – which is the error at the basis of Lyell’s and Darwin’s gradualism, stubbornly defended by Dawkins.

“There is no reason to think that the laws of physics are violated in living matter. There is nothing supernatural, no ‘life force’ to rival the fundamental forces of physics. … The body is a complex thing with many constituent parts, and to understand its behaviour you must apply the laws of physics to its parts, not to the whole. The behaviour of the body as a whole will then emerge [?] as a consequence of interaction of the parts. … It is only when we remember that it has many parts, all obeying laws of physics at their own level, that we understand the behaviour of the whole body. This is not, of course, a peculiarity of living things. It applies to all man-made machines, and potentially applies to any complex, many-parted object.” Thus goes the gospel of arch-reductionist Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker.

Then, a few pages further on, we read: “I am a biologist. I take the facts of physics, the facts of the world of simplicity [?], for granted. If physicists still don’t agree over whether those simple facts are yet understood, that is not my problem. My task is to explain elephants, and the world of complex things, in terms that physicists either understand, or are working on. The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity. The biologist tries to explain the working, and the coming into existence, of complex things, in terms of simpler things. He can regard his task as done when he has arrived at entities so simple that they can safely be handed over to physicists. … The kind of explanation we come up with must not contradict the laws of physics. Indeed it will make use of the laws of physics, and nothing more than the law of physics.”⁵²

In these passages physics is accepted as the ultimate foundation of biology. Yet, the “simple facts” of physics, which Dawkins takes for granted, seem not yet to be understood. Then how can he “safely hand over to the physicists” the fruits of his reductions, and on what basis are his reductions made? – Are the foundations of physics still in doubt? The answer seems to be: now more than ever, as discussed in books like John Horgan’s The End of Science, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Phycics, or Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong. There is indeed no reason to think “that the laws of physics are violated in living matter,” as the research beyond the circle of Dawkins’ thought tells us that they are not applicable to living matter in the way they are to dead matter.⁵³

“It is not new principles that we need,” writes Lewontin, “but a willingness to accept the consequences of the fact that biological systems occupy a different region of the space of physical relations than do simpler physico-chemical systems, a region in which the objects are characterized, first, by a very great internal physical and chemical heterogeneity and, second, by a dynamic exchange between processes internal to the objects and the world outside them. That is, organisms are internally heterogeneous open systems.”⁵⁴ It may be remembered that the author of these words is a geneticist and professor of biology at Harvard. Steven Rose, another professor of biology, at the University of London, said in an interview: “There is a strand within physics which says that physics is the ultimate science, and that everything else has to reduce to it. One of the things I am concerned with as a biologist is to say that physics is a model for doing physics; it is not a model for understanding the biological world. We [biologists] deal with much more complicated phenomena than physics. The brain is, I suspect, the most complex organization of matter in the universe. That degree of complexity doesn’t reduce to very simplistic models.”⁵⁵

“Systems biology is where we are moving to,” writes Denis Noble, formerly professor at Oxford. “Only, it requires a quite different mind-set. It is about putting together rather than taking apart, integration rather than reduction. It starts with what we have learned from the reductionist approach; and then it goes further. It requires that we develop ways of thinking about integration that are as rigorous as our reductionist procedures, but different. This is a major change. It has implications beyond the purely scientific. It means changing our philosophy, in the full sense of the term.”⁵⁶