Abstract
The problems of reduction in biology are currently of considerable theoretical interest and practical significance. Explicitly or implicitly they underlie many discussions and disputes among biologists concerning research strategies that biologists should adopt. Most biologists, I believe all those gathered around this table, are reductionists to the extent that we see life as a highly complex, highly special and highly improbable pattern of physical and chemical processes. To me, this is ‘reasonable’ reductionism. But should we go farther, and insist that biology must be so reduced to chemistry that biological laws and regularities could be deduced from what we shall learn about the chemistry of life processes? This, I think, is ‘unreasonable’ reductionism. The most spectacular advances in biology in our time were unquestionably those in molecular biology. Yet it does not follow that organismic biology is from now on unproductive, or that all of us should work exclusively on molecular biology. Should not organismic and molecular biology both continue to develop, because one without the other can only give a distorted view of life? Should the philosophy of biology deal with organismic, or with molecular aspects, or with both?
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