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Elsasser, Generalized Complementarity, and Finite Classes: A Critique of his Anti-Reductionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Kauffman*
Affiliation:
Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Chicago
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Extract

Serious students of cellular and developmental biology confront what may well be the gravest epistemological problems ever faced by scientists. These are direct consequences of the immense, ordered biochemical complexity of organisms.

One of the most extensive discussions of the epistemological problems confronting cell biologists has been supplied by Elsasser, whose views have had a rather wide audience [1, 2]. Elsasser is greatly to be admired for his insistence that biologists confront the epistemological problems of their science, and for his efforts to analyze those problems, which he feels center in our incapacity to know the quantum microstate of an organism. While I am sympathetic with his effort, I feel he misconstrues the epistemological consequences of our failure to know completely the organism's quantum microstates.

Type
Part II Philosophical Problems of Biology and Psychology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1972 , 1972 , pp. 57 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

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References

Elsasser, Walter M., Atom and Organism, a New Approach to Theoretical Biology, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1966.Google Scholar
Elsasser, Walter M., ‘The Role of Individuality in Biological Theory’, Towards a Theoretical Biology (ed. by Waddington, C. H.), Vol. 3, Aldine Publishing Co., Chicago, 1970.Google Scholar