Biology and the systems view. Is there a move towards systems approaches in the life sciences?

Abstract

For many people, the advent of systems biology seems to herald a new era of research that might finally usurp the traditional, reductionist approach that has sought to understand living beings through the study of their constituent parts. The systems approach, according to this stance, is a new way both to investigate the 'machine of life' and, at the same time, to appreciate the uniqueness of living organisms: the unforeseeable behaviour of the whole owing to so‐called emergent phenomena (Gilbert & Sarkar, 2000; Noble, 2008). Although systems biology is a rapidly growing field (Calvert, 2008), the question remains as to whether it represents a general trend in the life sciences, as theoreticians of biology diagnosed that it would be years ago (Sarkar, 2005; Keller 2005), or whether it is a less wide‐reaching phenomenon. Here, I present and discuss findings from an analysis of publications in reproductive genetics that could help to resolve this question. These findings indicate that although several individual articles from this field embrace systems approaches in a broad sense, most publications actually deal with relatively simple models of cause–effect relationships. The study also revealed that the complexity of models correlates with the types of technique and equipment used in the laboratory. Theoreticians studying the philosophy and history of molecular genetics and its epistemologies hold that molecular biology and genetics were largely inspired by the reductionist approach of the 1960s and 1970s, which stated that all living processes should be explicable on the basis of the molecules involved and their interactions. The 1980s, however, witnessed a move away from reductionism towards a systems approach in genetics (Sarkar, 2005; Kay, 2000; Keller, 2002, 2005). Some have associated the beginning of this development with the advent of the information sciences and their influence on …