Today, Teacher Chang Zengyi lectured on “biology driven by physics and chemistry,” discussing the concepts and techniques that physics and chemistry have brought to the life sciences, and introducing the contributions to the life sciences made throughout history by many scientists with backgrounds in physics and chemistry.
What Teacher Chang said was relatively superficial; it did not bring out the deeper connections between mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the development of the life sciences as a discipline. In fact, the reason the life sciences were able to develop so extensively under the push of physics and chemistry was not that, by historical accident, there happened to be some interdisciplinary scientists who just happened to introduce some achievements from physics and chemistry and thereby propel the field forward. Rather, under the logic of modern scientific development — the reductionist tradition of mathematics, physics, and experiment — if biology was to become “science,” it necessarily had to be pushed by physics and chemistry; and only when biology was able to be directly driven by mathematics, physics, and chemistry did it become life “science” in the modern sense.
The scientification of biology was not completed with Darwin. The first representative of the biologist as a figure of modern science was probably Mendel. Mendel’s paper, ahead of its time, is a typical modern scientific paper, whereas Darwin still represents the last splendor of the older tradition of natural history and the tradition of natural philosophy.
Mendel received training in mathematics and physics, and he introduced quantitative experimental methods into biological research. Biologists of Darwin’s generation also did experiments, but their experimental design, expectations, and interpretation differed from Mendel’s; this difference precisely symbolizes the distinction between the classical scientific tradition (natural philosophy + natural history) and modern science (mathematics, physics + experiment). Although Darwin carried out hybridization practices similar to Mendel’s, what he arrived at was a qualitative and speculative conclusion, and he did not carry the practice forward.
In Mendel’s case, the push of the mathematical sciences upon biology was neither manifested as the application of concepts and laws, nor as so-called interdisciplinary exchange, but rather as something more fundamental: a kind of “mathematical projection.” People do not observe phenomena in a completely blind way. When we go to observe phenomena, or design experiments so that phenomena may be observed, we have already, in some manner, made some prior arrangement of things. Mendel focused on seven traits of peas. These traits themselves, and even the way those traits changed in the offspring, had long since been “observed” by people; but only Mendel “saw” the laws within them. He treated these traits as separate elements, and the results of hybridization as numerical relations, whereas earlier botanists saw only entities such as “peas,” with various characteristics regarded as appendages of the whole plant rather than as independent elements that could be extracted; in their eyes there were also only qualitative outcomes such as uniformity, reversion to type, more or less, and so on, and they could not see results like 6022/2001 = 3.01:1. What enabled Mendel to see his phenomena was precisely the mathematical projection of modern science: this prior projection, before experiments were designed and before results were obtained, had already prescribed the order of things. Before the life sciences developed, the mathematical, physical, and chemical sciences had already been leading them in advance.
November 25, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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