Synthetic Biology, Gödel, and the Blind Watchmaker

Abstract

Historically, biology is a science that has been caught up in the debate of how to approach living beings: from the analytical or synthetic viewpoint. The analytical view encompasses the most successful biological sciences, particularly genetics, molecular biology, and evolutionary biology. They are considered to be models of a reductionist approach to appraising living beings because, with few exceptions, the conceptual tools and methods they have developed focus on parts, components, or particular traits. In genetics the basic features are the Mendelian trait, the mechanics of inheritance, and the laws governing transmission from one generation to the next. Molecular biology focuses on the chemical nature of genetic traits (i.e., genes) and on the molecular machinery involved in their expression and regulation, giving rise to a particular function. Evolutionary biology focuses mainly on the study of how an organism’s fitness is affected by certain genetic traits. Eventually a trait can evolve differentially with respect to any other trait, with or without similar fitness. All three sciences can be considered gene-oriented, which is an accurate description, and during the last 50 years the biology syllabus has been greatly dominated by this gene-centered analytical view. But there is more to the analytical view than that. Analysis means the study of an entity by breaking it down into its parts, and the vast majority of sciences are analytical by definition. Genetics, molecular biology, and evolutionary biology have developed successful methodological tools to study those parts of living organisms that are genes. However, there are many other biological sciences that are analytical, which approach the living entity by focusing on particular parts. Probably one can state that the analytical view is a permanent methodological approach to living beings, no matter which organizational or hierarchical level we consider (Ayala 1968). Historically, biological sciences approaching living entities analytically have been unequally successful, and it is a matter of fact that those sciences focusing on genes have achieved greater success than others focusing on other areas. Current genomic sciences are the typical by-product of the gene-centered approach to living beings. But can we approach a living being in a different way? Yes and no. The basic perception of many biologists and scientists in general is that living entities (complex entities, broadly speaking) cannot be appraised via an approach that adds up their parts and, less so, by considering that one single part (for instance, the gene, the genome) is enough to gain sufficient understanding of the living entity as a whole. I would like to point out the difference between analytical and reductionist approaches to science, particularly in biology. Analytic approaches do not discard the combination of parts and, then, the rules and/or laws derived by working separately with the parts could eventually be joined in the hope of achieving an increasingly better explanation of the living being as a whole. On the contrary, the reductionist approach discards the explanatory relevance of many parts of the living system because it assumes that once we have discovered the laws governing one particular and essential part, the rest and the whole can be explained. It has been argued that the analytical view is a reductionist view of science when, in reality, it is not. The analytical view probably constitutes the primary methodology of scientific method. Although both approaches take a different stand on the understanding of complex features, they share a common problem: How to approach or explain the appearance of emergent properties? For the analytical approach, this question is normally solved a posteriori as follows: The emergent property,