To Guy and Bob (Hi, Bob!):
Just off hand, I can think of three biological "laws" worth
mentioning here:
1. Cope's Law—"Structurally ordained biases of speciation away from a
lower size limit occupied by founding members of the clade, rather
than adaptive anagenesis towards organismal benefits of large
size" (Gould, 2002), which is to say that a clade's body size will
increase naturally with increasing speciation activity. This "law"
might be construed as equivalent to the Second Law, wherein entropy
must increase with more thermodynamic activity. In my own (perverse)
imagination, I might even say that Cope's Law could be equivalent to
Bob U's "ascendency hypothesis," referring to flow bits of carbon
(information) in ecological networks (Bob, am I off the mark here?).
2. Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium—a stochastic "law" (model) that
predicts the distribution of alleles p and q in a population:
p^2 + 2pq + q^2 = 1.
3. Haeckel's Biogenetic Law (now largely defunct)—this "law" captured
what was understood to be "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Some
biologists still subscribe to this law, giving extended life to ORP.
Personally, I think the "developmental plasticity" (homoplasy) folks
are still trying to bring back Haeckel's Law to some degree in order
to refute Gould's "deep homology."
Best regards, Richard
Hi Bob,
I doubt we disagree in substance here, but I would take issue with the
statement that "there are no laws for biology in the same sense as
the laws
of physics", because I think the laws of physics apply in all
realms. In
other words, the laws of physics are not limited to physics in an
exclusionary way, because all other disciplines exist within the
bounds of
physics. Therefore, the laws of physics are also laws of biology to me.
After picking this nit, I would agree that there are no additional,
proprietary laws of this sort within biology that do not extend to
non-biological physical systems.
Cheers,
Guy Hoelzer
on 10/26/06 7:16 AM, Robert Ulanowicz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Andrei Khrennikov wrote:
If we follow the line of Arne of realism/antirealism, then what
should
we say about LAWS OF NATURE? I think that we would come to the
conclusion that there is no such laws at all. Such a conclusion is
not
astonishing in the light of modern views to QM. Since QM (by the
conventional Copenhagen interpretation) declared the death of
determinism (and not because our impossibility to find such
deterministic dynamics, but because quantum randomness is
irredusible),
it seems that at the quantum level we are not able to consider
physical
laws. We are able only to find some statistical correlations.
I think that this is totally wrong position. As Newton was, I am also
surprised by harmony and consistence in Nature. It could not be
just a
product of our social agreement. Well, finally Newton came to the
idea
of God who was responsible for this harmony.
Dear Andrei:
Like Walter Elsasser, I believe there are no laws for biology in
the same
sense as the laws of physics.
Yes, I agree there is regularity and order in the biological world.
Whence the order? Processes, not law.
For further details, please see:
<http://www.cbl.umces.edu/~ulan/ISEPP.DOC>
The best,
Bob
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Robert E. Ulanowicz | Tel: (410) 326-7266
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory | FAX: (410) 326-7378
P.O. Box 38 | Email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1 Williams Street | Web <http://www.cbl.umces.edu/
~ulan>
Solomons, MD 20688-0038 |
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