Warren
Bohr’s idea about complementarity in biology makes sense, and not only as an analogy. Just as quantum waves and particles are complementary – ie they cannot be explained in terms of each other – so are organisms and molecules complementary – in that explaining biochemistry or biophysics goes only a small way to explaining the reality of the organism. This illustrates the philosophical weakness of the reductionist theory that in principle biology could ultimately be explained by physics. Niels Bohr effectively claims the whole is more than the sum of the parts, whereas traditional physics, including visions of a unified field theory, is reductionist, seeing nothing more in the whole (eg the organism) than can be explained by its physical mechanism. I am sympathetic to the idea of complementarity in biology because phenomena such as intentions are features of the dynamic organism and its ecology and are not helpfully explained by physics.
Dyson makes the following point in his review, in addition to those I quoted above: “In my opinion, the double helix is much too simple to be the secret of life. If DNA had been the secret of life, we should have been able to cure cancer long ago. The double helix explains replication but it does not explain metabolism. Delbrück chose to study the phage because it embodies replication without metabolism, and Crick and Watson chose to study DNA for the same reason. Replication is clean while metabolism is messy. By excluding messiness, they excluded the essence of life. The genomes of human and other creatures have now been completely mapped and the processes of replication have been thoroughly explored, but the mysteries of metabolism still remain mysteries. The phage is still the only living creature whose behavior is simple enough to be completely understood and predicted. To understand other kinds of creatures, from fruit flies to humans, we need also a deep understanding of metabolism. The understanding of metabolism will perhaps be the theme of the next revolution in biology.”
Robert