The hole in the whale - The philosophy of biology
Or would you rather collect stamps? Manuela Lenzen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 6, 2003 In the summer of 1932, the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and "a surgeon named Chievitz" sailed from Copenhagen to the island of Fyn. As they search the dark sea for position lights in the pouring rain, a conversation develops: What would happen if the boat collided with a whale? ... In the summer of 1932, the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and "a surgeon named Chievitz" sailed from Copenhagen to the island of Fyn. As they search the dark sea for position lights in the pouring rain, a conversation develops: What would happen if the boat collided with a whale? "Both would probably get a hole." quotes Christian Göldenboog Chievitz: "But that's the difference between living and dead matter. The hole in the whale would heal by itself, our boat would probably remain broken. Especially if we were lying on the seabed with it." The rest of the night passed with "philo-physical yarn" about living and dead matter, Darwin and Newton, biology and physics. In the hierarchy of science, physics was the undisputed leader for a long time. Not a few physicists still dream of the great unified theory, the theory for everything, in which not only electromagnetic force and gravitational force find their place, but in which chemistry can be reduced to physics and biology to chemistry. And that's not all: In a lecture in 1980, physicist Stephen Hawking lamented that it had not yet been possible to reduce the study of human behavior to a branch of applied mathematics. In his book, Christian Göldenboog presents the most important topics from the philosophy of biology, which, true to the motto of the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, is primarily the philosophy of evolutionary theory. Göldenboog knows how to prepare the rather brittle topic for the layman: The first half of the book consists of four essays loosened up by numerous quotations, but hardly coherent, about physics and its relationship to biology, Ernst Mayr and immunology in the light of evolution. The second part consists of commented conversations that he had with some of the greats of biology: with the population geneticist Francisco Ayala, the sociobiologist Bert Hölldobler, the evolutionary geneticist John Maynard Smith and above all with the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who like no other the autonomy of the Biology and its methods defended. His thoughts consistently serve as a contrasting foil to those of the other authors, so that the entire book can be read as a tribute to the ninety-nine-year-old Harvard professor. Before starting with the biology, however, the reader must first work his way through a good fifty pages of theory for everything, Higgs bosons, quantum physics and superstring theory, in which the living world only appears marginally. Once this is behind him, however, the reader is more than willing to subscribe to Ernst Mayr's verdict that the whole thing has nothing at all to do with understanding life on earth. Ernest Rutherford once argued that science is either physics or stamp collecting. Biology is a "dirty science" is a commonplace among physicists. In fact, the biology is different. No natural constants, no laws without exceptions, no essentialism. Darwin's great lesson, Mayr explains, was to appreciate diversity. Differences between individuals are not deviations from an eternal norm, but the basis of further development. There would be no evolution if all individuals were identical. Physicists think in categories, biologists in populations, says Mayr. And to drive the philosophers of science completely to despair: physicists only know one cause, in biology there are always at least two: the laws of physics and the genetic program, sometimes even more. According to Mayr, biologists do not need quantum mechanics, life cannot be explained in terms of elementary particles. And Mayr also considers mathematics, whose unbelievable efficiency in physics the French physicist Etienne Klein describes as a "great secret", to be dispensable. Of course, this does not go through without criticism from colleagues: "If he says that mathematics does not play any useful role in biology - God bless him," comments John Maynard Smith. Above all, he values mathematics as a challenge to formulate his theses clearly: "Mathematics tells whether a thesis can be proven." Smith's hero is not so much Darwin as August Weismann, who not only differentiated between body cells and germ line cells, but also introduced the concept of information into biology: Maynard Smith emphasizes that this does not exist in physics. Otherwise, he states that the fronts are shifting: "Physics is becoming less and less mechanistic, I can hardly understand what's going on there. Biology, on the other hand, is becoming more and more mechanistic." Francisco Ayala agrees: Darwin's greatest achievement was to find a mechanistic explanation for the workings of evolution, instead of, like Aristotle, imposing the categories of animate nature on inanimate nature and explaining it by the determination of the stone, that this on the earth falls. In the end, the Harvard biologist Mayr even sees the possibility of building a bridge to the humanities in the theory of evolution, because historical processes are important in both sciences. Working out exactly what it means to build such a bridge is likely to be the task of a transdisciplinary theory of science that has yet to be established. The loose form of commented conversations makes reading easy for the reader, but it also means that he sometimes has to find the common thread with some effort. The philosophy of biology is just beginning. Above all, Göldenboog's book provides a catalog of topics that await thorough treatment.
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