Ralphlaurenpigeonforge

Reductionism / 3

The extreme position of those who would reduce the study of biology to chemistry to physics and it does not seem sustainable, and this position can also be seen as a physicist Murray Gell-Mann:

forms of terrestrial life are the result of a large number of random events, each of which would have contributed to the remarkable regularity of terrestrial biochemistry, making them acquire, thus, a high effective complexity. [...]
The laws of biology depend on the laws of physics and chemistry, but also a great deal of additional information on how those events are determined accidental. Here, far more than in nuclear physics, condensed matter physics or chemistry, it is noted that there is a huge difference between the type of reduction to the fundamental physical laws that can, in principle, ordinary and type the word "reduction" might evoke in the minds of the naive reader. The study of living is much more complex of fundamental physics: in fact a very large number of the regularities of terrestrial organisms resulting from accidental events, as well as by the basic laws (1).

In other words, one can not trace the study of biology, and in particular of the biology of living, only a series of laws , because there is an element that makes an essential contribution to the development of biological organisms: the case . Due to the randomness is created history, understood as a series of events possible and not wholly attributable to a need, which becomes, in this context, an essential tool for scientific analysis. Consider, as an example of accidental cause, the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the consequences in the evolution, which it followed.
The presence of biological development in the case mean that certain information must be introduced at the same level that is being analyzed, because, by definition, the case is not reducible to causal explanations.

(1) M. Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, Bollati Boringhieri 1996 (1994), pp. 140-141.