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Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.4 (2001) 473-484



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The Biology of the Future and the Future of Biology

Steven Rose *


Constraints on Knowing Nature

We view and interpret the world around us, both natural and cultural, through perceptual and cognitive spectacles of our own construction. The natural sciences claim that their methods, of hypothesis, observation, and experiment, permit something approximating to a true representation of the material reality that surrounds us to be achieved. However, for several decades now, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have been pointing to the ways in which our scientific knowledge is socially, culturally, and historically constructed--that is, it offers at best a constrained interpretation of the material world. A first such constraint is provided by the very construction of our brain and the biology of our perceptual processes.To this I would add that brains do not exist in isolation from bodies: how we perceive the world is affected by our hormonal, immunological, and general physiological state. And we perceive the world in the way that we do because our visual system is capable of sensing only a limited range of wavelengths, and our mass and volume give us a particular relationship to gravitational forces not shared, for instance, by bacteria or beetles, or by whales or elephants. Our sense of the temporality of events is shaped by the fact that we [End Page 473] may live for anything up to, and now even beyond, a century. Bacteria divide every 20 minutes or so, mayflies live for a day, redwood trees for thousands of years. Human technologies can and do enable us to escape these structural and temporal limitations, to observe in the infrared or ultraviolet, to weigh atoms and measure time in anything from nanoseconds to light years. Yet even when considering the inconceivably small or distant, we do so by scales that relate to our human condition: the measure of Man is Man.

But there are other constraints that transcend our mere biology. One--which is where the sciences differ most from the arts and humanities--is that we are not free to offer interpretations which our observations of, and experiments on, the external world disconfirm. A second is defined by the limits of our available technologies. Until the means of circumnavigating the earth were available, it was a legitimate approximation to the truth to maintain that the earth was flat. Until Lavoisier weighed the products of combustion, phlogiston theory was as good as oxygen theory. Until microscopes revealed the internal constituents of living tissue, it was legitimate to regard cells as composed of homogeneous protoplasm.

But a third and equally important constraint is that resulting from the very social and historical nature of the scientific enterprise itself.The ways in which we view the world, the types of experiments we conceive and evidence we accept, the theories we construct, are far from being culturally free. This means that we cannot understand the current shape of biological thinking without reference to the history of our own discipline.This should not surprise us. After all, in a famous aphorism known to all biologists, the great evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky pointed out that nothing in biology made sense except in the context of evolution. I would want merely to broaden that statement to read "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the context of history"--by which I mean evolutionary history, developmental history, and the history of our own subject. This does not imply a simple progressivism; new knowledge claims may well be, but are not necessarily, "better" representations of the material world than prior ones.

The Power of Reductionist Thinking and the Plurality of Biological Explanation

For reasons that would take too long to explore here, throughout its post-Cartesian and Newtonian history, Western science has seen physics as its explanatory model.The more pluralistic, pre-scientific world gave way to one in which all our day-to-day experiential richness of color and sound, of love and anger, came to be seen...

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