January 22, 2024
In Smart’s “Physics and Biology” it is argued that there are no biological laws in the strict sense due to the complicated nature of biological creatures. Physics and chemistry have laws within them, but biology does not have laws in the strict sense, just mere generalizations. For example, if we make a strict rule about mice for example, we are failing to acknowledge its inherent subjectivity. For example in the case of anomalies— what about mice with 5 legs instead of 4, what about mice in other universes? Another example is that even all motors of a certain make and year behave slightly differently. It is comparable to Plato’s analogy of the cave in the sense that there is one paradigm example we may use, however, everything else is a copy and will be different in some sense, even if only slightly. Even if we tried to add in certain clauses to protect our laws, there would likely be something we did not account for. In summation, there is not a naturally occurring sharp division between the physical and biological sciences. There is some sort of division, however it is complicated and unclear.
In class we talked about how Smart wouldn’t even say that laws of biology are approximately true because we don’t know in what instances something will fail and we do not know the limits of our accuracy. In other words, even if something holds true most of the time or fails most of the time under a certain condition, there could be an anomaly or something we simply did not foresee. This is because of the following:
Premise: For laws to apply everywhere in space and time they must relate entities with properties that do not carry such as the fundamental particles or chemical spaces
Premise: biology concerns entities that are highly variable
Therefore: there can be no laws in biology
Overall, I agree with Smart and what we talked about in class. That being said, what are the implications of there not even being approximately true laws in biology. Can we really be sure of anything? Even if, lets say physics has rules within it that hold true, they’ve only held true so far, right? What if the circumstances change and the rules of nature change? If there’s a major Earth-altering event, would we not expect our norms to shifts even in areas we see as constants now? I find that I leave this discussion with more questions than I anticipated but I am intrigued to see how we continue to navigate this discussion next class.
