Systematics and the future of biology

Abstract

B iology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so. A large part of the future of biology depends on interdisciplinary studies that allow easy travel across the three dimensions. Molecular and cellular biology, the subdisciplines of maximum support and activity today, occupy the two lowest levels of biological organization. They are focused on the first dimension in a small set of model species, selected primarily for their ease of culturing and the special traits that make them amenable for different kinds of analysis. The triumph of molecular and cellular biology has been the documentation of one of the two overarching principles of biology: that all living phenomena are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other overarching principle of biology is that all living phenomena originated and evolved by natural selection. That, in turn, has been the triumph of organismic and evolutionary biology. Viewed in the framework of the history of biology, the subdisciplines of molecular and cellular biology are in the natural history period of their development. This perhaps surprising characterization can be clarified with the following metaphor. The cell is a system consisting of a very large number of interacting elements and processes. It can be compared to a conventional ecosystem, such as a lake or forest, in this sense: Researchers …