Climbing the stairs

Now that we've laid the foundation and finished the basement, it's time to build the next story in our edifice of science, biology.  Biology depends on chemistry -- life, we now know, consists of chemical processes. However, while chemistry may be predictable in principle, biology is not predictable from chemistry. Life on earth came to be what it is through billions of years of evolution, i.e. the pruning of stochastic events by selection. There is no reason why the genetic code has to consist of three letter units built out of adenine, cytosine, guanine and uracil, and certainly no reason why thymine has to be replaced by uracil in messenger RNA. And there is no reason why anything else about life has to be the way it is.

 

However, biology obviously has to be consistent with chemistry and physics, and it is possible to specialize in studying the linkages between them as a biochemist or biophysicist. (Biophysics, at least so far, operates at the macro level and Newtonian physical theory is perfectly good for it.) However, biological science depends on theoretical constructs, experimental and observational techniques that are distinct to it, and that chemists and physicists are not trained to use. Once again, life has emergent properties that operate at the level of life and which cannot practicably be understood through physics and chemistry.

 

This is where Linus Pauling went wrong. He didn't understand the methods of biology, and more specifically of biomedical science. Since we're very interested in what can go wrong with our own mortal organisms, a lot of effort and money goes into the applied biology of fixing humans. And here scientists definitively enter Habermas's Second World, of values and ethics. Pauling, who was highly distinguished as a humanitarian and champion of justice, actually went wrong here with his Vitamin C mishegos, because there are ethical considerations about the interpretation and uses of biomedical research, and how it should be publicly presented, that he violated. This brings us to a very timely discussion which will come next.