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THE FORMAL AND THE INTUITIVE IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES HAO WANG* Not being a biologist, I am looking at the field from an outsider's point of view, in the hope that it might be of interest to the insiders. In the process of preparing this essay I have come to appreciate the broad and indefinite range of the subject. For example, philosophy, psychology, methodology, and history ofscience are all relevant. The most I can do is to select a few examples and hint at larger and more careful projects. For instance, many observations could be made about the history of the study ofDNA, as, for instance, reported by Robert Olby [I]. But it seems better to leave that topic out. Of the various senses of "the formal," I am primarily concerned with the properties of being explicit, definite, precise, regular, and conventional (following a rule). By derivation, a formal task tends to be more routine and wanting in freedom. Moreover, as it happens in the history of science, the formal tends to be more abstract and more universal. The intuitive is what is obtained by intuition, and intuition is immediate apprehension. Apprehension could be sensation, knowledge, or even mystical rapport. Immediate is the absence ofmediation by inference, by justification, by articulation, by method, or by language and thought. The basic ambiguity of the intuitive comes from what was available before the moment of insight. In the rudimentary form the intuitive is what comes with ease, what is familiar and part of common sense. What is of interest in the present discussion is a more advanced form of intuition , construed as the terminal of a process by which one allows facts and ideas to float around until some insight makes sense out of them, often in accordance with a prechosen goal. A familiar story is Kekulé's The author is grateful for comments and suggestions made by Birger Blombäck, Paul Cranefield, Joshua Lederberg, Heinz Pagels, and especially San You Wang. A shortened version of this paper was given as the opening lecture at the Ninth International Congress of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, Stockholm, Sweden, July 3-9, 1983. ?Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, New York 10021.© 1984 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/84/2704-04 10$01 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 27, 4 ¦ Summer 1984 | 525 discovery of the structure of benzene (?ß?ß) in 1865, after his dream of a snake biting its own tail. The element of luck, more often than not, plays a role as chance encounters happen to suggest ideas which meet the requirements being sought. Science is generally considered a formal endeavor, but it cannot be denied that in the process of scientific discovery intuition and the intuitive necessarily play an essential part. Hence, one crucial issue is to find the appropriate blending of the formal and the intuitive, to attain the right intuition, and to choose the suitable formal tools. While this appropriateness is my central theme, it is a little hard to summarize the string of observations I have assembled below. I shall mention some examples on the use and misuse in biology of more formal disciplines, contrast luck and intuition and discovery and bacteriology with skill and persistence and teamwork and chemistry by reviewing the development of penicillin, and remark on some characters of the traditional Chinese medicine. Next will be a few comments on the value of intuition in the work of Mendel and Darwin, on the misuse of intuition in the form of preconceived ideas, on differences in and choices of disciplines, on the axiomatization of a field, on order and chaos, and on biology as a provisional science. I shall try to connect this diversity of topics to my central theme. Finally, I shall conclude with a nostalgic note on a simpler scientific life and a list of twin concepts bearing some kinship to the formal-intuitive pair. More Formal Disciplines In terms of results of research, it seems reasonable to accept a rough scale according to which psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics , and computation may be taken as being increasingly more formal . In this sense one might speak of more...

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