Part II

Biological Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis

With its synthesis of theory at multiple levels, the biological sciences therefore are some of the best worked-out areas of science that exist. Some normal scientific problems remain as many unanswered questions still exist.

It is not the effort of this second part to reiterate in textbook fashion all the foundations of biological sciences, which are many. The main effort of this second part is to target some as yet unanswered issues on a larger scale of macroscopic evolution, and then to frame the understanding of biological sciences at several distinctive levels within natural systems theory, with the aim of then describing important relationships between the levels. Finally, the attempt is made to define the important role that human beings have come to assume in biological processes on earth.

In particular, I have come to focus on the central model of natural selection as a critical problem that has not yet been fully worked out. Natural selection has been the driving component of Darwin's central theory, and therefore has been one of the most important working models in all the sciences. While basic mechanisms of selection are fairly well described and empirically substantiated with a tremendous amount of documentation, from a comprehensive point of view there have been leftover questions about mechanisms underlying processes of natural selection. These are not by any means just residual questions to be solved as pieces to a larger puzzle. The centrality of these questions in the basic equations of life in answer to our fundamental questions about life, make them to some extent strategically pivotal in the story of evolution.

I have sought to define the central driving mechanism of evolutionary theory in systemic terms that are internally coherent. The order and pattern, as well as the sense of progressive development, found in life, cannot be adequately explained in terms of invoking an endless series of chance exogenous mechanisms or an infinite range of particularistic situations or events. Such mechanisms and situations undoubtedly exist in great magnitude, but they cannot account fully for the internal order that evolution has evinced, its stability of pattern, its adaptation and endurance, and its cyclical periodicities at every level.

The continuous invocation of chance mechanisms in the application of evolutionary theory to particularistic frameworks and the understanding of natural histories of species has tended to obscure the inner determinations and parsimony within the model of natural selection. External "chance" mechanisms at most can account for the epigenetic variation and the "entropy" found within biological systems. But to get at the internal, repetitive order of such systems, a theoretical model must exist that adequately accounts for internally patterned processes at every level.

In general, I have sought to derive such models in "ultimate" terms that are stated as "strong generalizations." It must be noted that in the biological world, contrasted to the world of the purely physical, there are few rules without exceptions. Therefore, one would be hard put to derive invariable "proximate" generalizations applicable to each and every instance that natural history presents to us. Construing biological systems from an information systems perspective requires such strong formalism on a general level.

While some new re-synthesis may emerge from evolutionary theory, the suggestion is that we are likely to dramatically amend our biological constructs of evolutionary theory only when and if we encounter extra-terrestrial life forms, and if we do not extinguish ourselves beforehand. Biology is headed for a long period of "normal science" that will be marked by much revision and revisionism on many levels but is unlikely to change substantially in its central configurations.

Evolutionary theory informs in a grand sense our theoretical thinking of biological systems. Of course, the only biological system we yet know of is what exists on the planet earth. It is possible our thinking might change somewhat if and when we finally encounter alien forms of life in the universe. Hypothetically speaking, though the odds for the suigeneris development of life in natural circumstances may be slim to none, the chances of some kind of life form surviving somewhere in the far-flung corners of an unimaginably vast universe are probably as close to 100 percent as anyone can get. Even so, it is also the case that the distances and obstacles between contact of especially intelligent life forms are so great, that the likelihood of their discovery, much less our direct meeting, diminishes once again to almost nothing.

We can only speculate at this time how such alternative life forms might have evolved. Whether they are constrained to adopt the same kind of carbon-oxygen system occurring on the earth, or whether some other solution to the problem of life was naturally discovered.

We are ourselves now in the midst of a biological revolution as researchers are unlocking and mapping and manipulating in the genetic secrets of life. We cannot understand biological systems theory without learning clearly how genetics works in detail as the basis for biological information and reproduction.

And it is this that separates a biological system from a mere physical system. Biological systems reproduce themselves on some level and in some way, and thereby become subject to the laws of evolution in a manner purely physical systems do not. Purely physical systems in time decay and disintegrate as systems, but their components merely become rearranged in some other pattern. They can not die, as biological systems will, because they were never living in the first place. We do not see the end of a solar system as an extinction event in the same way that we see the end of a species. Species evolve because they reproduce themselves. They are living because they are reproductive systems.

Natural Systems

2001