Science as Process and Perspective – 09. Process Biology

This lecture deviates a bit from the usual format of this lecture series. It shows how changing philosophical perspective can concretely affect the kind of research you do. I use examples from biology to illustrate how process thinking expands the range of questions we can ask, and the kinds of explanations we accept as valid.

If you are not interested in these concrete examples, you can skip straight ahead to lecture 10.

Biology is a science where the importance of process can hardly be missed. Phylogenesis, the generation of new lineages during evolution, is a process. At a shorter timescale, there are the processes of metabolism, physiology, and development that constitute the life cycle of an organism. Evolution is thus basically a process of changing processes. And yet, substance-based explanations are much more common in biology than in physics. All too often, we still focus on identifying genes that "cause" this or that trait, without really explaining how they do so. Biologists are often content with parts lists of genes involved in the formation of a given character. In the best case, they extend their views to networks of genes that interact with each other. However, such network diagrams are also still static things, instead of truly processual explanations.

A particularly stubborn substance-based view in biology is the metaphor of the organism as a machine. I show how it would be advantageous to get past this metaphor, and to treat organisms explicitly as streams of metabolic matter and energy. I provide a number of examples from the history of biology to show how this could be done.

If you are interested in process biology, you should consult the excellent volume called Everything Flows, edited by Dan Nicholson and John Dupré. An open-access PDF is accessible through the Oxford University Press website.