Biology and Unitary Principle

Abstract

The candid student of scientific method will recognize that biology is not entirely a physical science, while acknowledging that it owes its present state of development largely or mainly to physical conceptions and methods. It is clear that the constant features of vital organization and activity presuppose the physical constancies as basis. Nevertheless the living organism has proved in many ways refractory to a purely physical analysis. This is not merely because the higher organisms have their psychical side and that psychological method differs from physical method; conceivably a properly unified science might apply equally to the physical and the psychical sides of nature. Nor is it entirely because vital behaviour is more individualized and less predictable than physical behaviour. It is rather that certain fundamental features of natural process, largely neglected by physics, are just those which are of chief importance in those flux-like entities which are living organisms. The traditional methods of physics, which analyze nature into combinations of invariant elements and processes, are ill-adapted to deal with the fluid, asymmetrical and largely indeterminate features of process as displayed so conspicuously in living organisms. This, put briefly, is the contention of L. L. Whyte, physicist and author of the recent remarkable book on the relations between physics and biology. In the present paper I propose first to consider especially those sections of the book which bear more particularly on the fundamental problems of biology; this part is paraphrase and commentary rather than summary, although never departing far from the subject of unitary principle as defined by Whyte. Later I shall consider some philosophical implications which seem important. For the details of Whyte's exposition the reader should refer to his book, which is notably clear, concise and critical in style and treatment, as well as comprehensive and fully realistic in its point of view.