Editor’s note: This is part of a lecture series on “Understanding Biology” that Prof. Kambadur Muralidhar, a renowned scientist and teacher, gave at the University of Hyderabad in 2017, which he kindly shared with Club Sciwri. We will be presenting these lectures in parts, over the coming months.
The origin of life on earth is still shrouded in mystery. One of the hypotheses currently debated is the idea of ‘Panspermia’.
Biology is the science of living organisms. The geographical space where living organisms are present is called the Biosphere. This includes air, water and soil. Whether there is life in space outside of Earth (extra-terrestrial?), is debatable. The entire science of ‘Exobiology’ deals with this notion. It essentially consists of studying rock samples from other planets and moons, for the signs of life! Cyril Ponnamperuma, an American scientist of Sri Lankan origin, was one of the greatest exobiologists. The origin of life on earth is still shrouded in mystery. One of the hypotheses currently debated is the idea of ‘Panspermia’.
Biologists, for a very long time, roughly for 1700 years from Aristotle’s time, dating around 350 B.C. until Renè Descartes of France, did not carry out any investigative experimentation. Those were the days when the Roman church controlled the western world, which was generally opposed to Science in the modern sense. Biologists, however, described flora and fauna around the world by conducting expeditions. They essentially described Biodiversity. Taxonomy was established, so as to remember and record all the life forms, since the information was too voluminous to handle. With the advent of the magnifying glass and later of the optical microscope, biologists continued to describe living organisms, dividing them into plants, animals and microbes. There was no common theme, question or purpose behind this description. Biology became divided into Botany, Microbiology and Zoology. This was Classical biology, which was descriptive and phenomenological, later termed as Natural History.
Renè Descartes advocated the use of concepts and techniques from Physics and Chemistry to investigate and thereby understand the living structures, processes or phenomena.
Renè Descartes, the French mathematician and probably the first Philosopher of Science, brought two changes in our approach to science and to Biology in particular. The utility value of science was given more importance, than merely understanding the structure and function of Nature. Nature included both the inanimate physical matter and the animate, organic living world. The aim of science was to control Nature and derive creature comforts for human life. He kept Man (male) outside of Nature and everything else, including woman as part of the Nature, thus echoing ancient Indian philosophical ideas. Secondly, he advocated the use of concepts and techniques from Physics and Chemistry to investigate and thereby understand the living structures, processes or phenomena. The fields of Anatomy, Physiology and true experimental biology emerged and slowly dominated all the branches of Biology. Reductionist Biology became ‘The Biology’ in vogue, much to the annoyance of Taxonomists. Reductionist Biology culminated in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Ironically this did not lead to the understanding of Biology, since it was merely ‘molecular’ description!
Two major events increased the respectability of ‘Classical Biology’ on one hand and ‘Reductionist Biology’ on the other. One was the establishment and acceptance of Darwinian ideas of organic evolution by Natural selection. This elegantly explained biological phenomena at every level in the organizational hierarchy of living objects that is ecosystem, population, organismic, cellular, including at the molecular level. The essence of this theory is that life is a stochastic process and there is no room for deterministic ideas in biology. Our lives are not predetermined and this is why the evolutionary direction is not predictable. The second, was the demonstration of ‘bacterial transformation’ by Cohen and Boyer in 1972. This ushered in ‘Molecular Biotechnology’, the more “useful” part of Biology. Conceptual Biology as another vision of Truth about Nature, was a casualty.
The third phase (or even ‘face’) of Biology primarily addressed the property of ‘emergence’ in organized living structures like molecular assemblies/sub-cellular organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, populations and even ecosystems. The Gaia hypothesis extends this to whole of the Earth, functioning as a single living organism! While reductionist biology claimed understanding the parts (or components) which leads to understanding the ‘whole’, thus denying emergent phenomena is of external origin (God?), Systems Biology, the third phase or face of Biology, revealed that interaction among the components of a ‘whole system’ leads to emergent properties. In a way they also reject the supernatural origin of ‘vital force’/emergent property. As examples, we can say mind is an emergent property of intra-brain processes and evolution is an emergent property of underlying physiological processes.
The most important question is: how structure sub-serves function. One can pose this question at molecular, cellular, organismic or population levels.
Biology asks three questions and seeks answers for them. The most important question is: how structure sub-serves function. One can pose this question at molecular, cellular, organismic or population levels. The second question is mechanistic in nature and wishes to establish proximate cause and effect in living processes (most of reductionist biology) and the last question is identifying the ultimate cause (reason) for living processes and for this there aren’t any suitable answers. Discussing the third question leads us to non-natural scientific areas, like sociology and philosophy!
Suggested Reading Material:
- Ernst Mayr (1997) This is Biology, Harvard University Press.
- Cairns-Smith, AG (1998) Seven clues to the origin of Life, Cambridge University Press.
- Taleb, NN (2007) The Black Swan, Penguin Books.
- Gadagkar, R (1997) Survival strategies-conflict and cooperation in Animal societies, Universities Press (India) Ltd.
- Bhargava, P (1995) Science, Philosophy & Culture in Historical Perspective in PHISPC (Eds) DP Chattopadhyay and Ravindra Kumar, Volumes 1 and 3.
- Kambadur Muralidhar (2008) What organisms do in PHISPC (Eds) DP Chattopadhyay and Ravindra Kumar Vol XII, Part 6 (Ed) NS Rangasawmi, Life and Organicism, pp117-158.
- Brenner, S (1997) Loose Ends from Current Biology, Current Biology Ltd.
- Julian Sutton (1998) Biology, McMillan Education Palgrave Publication.
- Neil Campbell and Jane Reece (2001) Biology, Pearson Benjamin Cummins.
- Peter Raven, Johnson, G, Mason, K, Losos, J, and Singer, S (2016) Biology 11th Edition.
- Brian T White and Mischke, M (2006) A Problems approach to Introductory Biology ASM Press.
- Kambadur Muralidhar, (2015) Introductory Biology, Module 1, e- book on MSc in Biophysics, MHRD publication (Ed) M. Rajeswari.
Author
Prof. Kambadur Muralidhar is an Indian biologist, known for his work in biochemistry, endocrinology and reproductive biology. He taught at Delhi University for over thirty years, and was Head of its Department of Zoology. Currently, he is Jawaharlal Nehru Chair Professor, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He is also highly regarded as a teacher and educator, and has contributed to biology education at both high school and college levels.
Editors
Roopsha Sengupta, PhD edited, and Paurvi Shinde, PhD, proofread the article.
Roopsha Sengupta did her Ph.D. in the Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna and postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge UK, specializing in the field of Epigenetics. Besides science and words, she enjoys spending time with children, doodling, and singing.
Paurvi is a recent PhD, in Biomedical Sciences (Immunology) with expertise in T cell activation pathways. She currently works as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Bloodworks Northwest in Seattle, where she studies the mechanism of how alloantibodies are formed against ‘non-ABO Red Blood Cell antigens’. Apart from science, she loves editing scientific articles to convey the message behind it, in a clear and concise form.
Artist
Ipsa provided the cover image. She is a post-doctoral fellow at Instem, Bangalore. She tries to communicate science through visual arts as a medium. Collecting graphic books, tree trash, and reading brain pickings is few of her favourites. Follow and purchase her artwork at Ipsawonders (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). She will be happy to hear praises and non-praises at ipsajain.31@gmail.com.
Other images in the blog courtesy Wikimedia and Pixabay.
Blog design: Roopsha Sengupta
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