Some of the most interesting stuff in Biology is a bit "off grid" and decidedly NOT of the "materialist reductionist" viewpoint, which is probably actually what 'bristles' religionists although they don't understand the lingo or the science AND the DIFFERENCES of thought that are actually out there. They assume science= materialist= no god.
"Field concepts and the Emergence of a new Biophysics"
marcobischof.com
<A look into the history of biology and biophysics shows that there always have been alternative traditions to the molecular-reductionistic approach now dominant in these fields. >>
<<The German founders of biophysics at the beginning of the 19th century, people like H.Helmholtz, E.Du Bois-Reymond, E.Brücke, C.Ludwig, E.H.Weber and G.T.Fechner, usually are depicted by historians of science as staunch reductionists and opponents of vitalistic and idealist ideas in biology. However, as Culotta has shown19, in reality they were not in such a sharp opposition to the romantic Naturphilosophie spirit of the time, and nearer to the antireductionistic approach of Claude Bernard, than is generally assumed. >>
<<The noted quantum chemist, Hans Primas, agrees with this fundamental criticism29,30. He writes that molecular biology, as it exists today, is in fact engineering, not science. >>
<<For Primas29, the primary shortcoming of molecular biology is that the holistic character of the physical world now recognized in quantum theory is either not acknowledged by the bioengineers or rejected as irrelevant. He emphasizes that molecular biology, though well grounded in empirical knowledge, has no foundation whatsoever in the principles of quantum theory, contrary to a widely held belief to the opposite. >>
<<With this view of quantum mechanics Primas follows Bohr and the school of Heisenberg 37, 38, while quark physics as founded by M.Gell-Mann continues to cultivate democritean atomism with their clinging to the concept of elementary particles39. Similar holistic views of quantum theory are the „bootstrap theory“ of G.Chew 40, D.Bohm’s „Causal Quantum Theory“ or „Holographic Theory of Reality“ 41, 42, and others advocated by H.Stapp43, A.Goswami 44-46, Kafatos & Nadeau47, Friedman48, D.Peat, F.Capra, H.Atmanspacher49, and many others. This holistic view of quantum theory, although the phenomena on which it is based are not yet completely understood theoretically, cannot be rejected anymore because the strange EPR quantum correlations of non-interacting and spatially separated systems have been amply demonstrated in many experiments50-54. Therefore the world-view of classical physics, atomism and mechanistic reductionism definitely cannot anymore be the basis of our worldview, and of biophysics. Quantum mechanics has established the primacy of the unseparable whole.>>
<<In this perspective, the molecular view is legitimate and important and should not be abandoned; molecular biologists can be rightly proud of their successes. It should be cultivated, but not at the expense of other viewpoints. It is its extreme one-eyedness that must be criticised. However, as Primas points out, „biology is more than molecular biology“. He postulates that science must now redirect ist attention to the wholeness of nature, and therefore will have to ask radically new questions. It has to develop a concept of reality which does not exclude any part of it. Those properties which belong to organisms only as wholes must remain within the scope of science. Therefore, it will be necessary to consider the phenomena as well from „bottom-up“, as in mechanistic understanding, as from „top-down“, as in vitalistic and holistic understanding. According to Primas, the notion that the latter is not legitimate or secondary is a prejudice that must be overcome. From the viewpoint of the quantum-theoretical worldview, both are completely equivalent, but lead to fundamentally different research agendas and insights. Even the criteria according to which the scientist decides what is scientifically defendable and interesting, are completely different from these two viewpoints. Also, according to quantum theory functional and teleological explanations are completely legitimate and equivalent to causal ones; even the primacy of causality has no foundation in the first principles of physics. >>
More good stuff
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