science has always been obsessed with laws. newtonian physics, maxwell’s equations, even einstein’s elegant formulations—all these give us the illusion that the universe operates according to fixed, immutable principles. but what if this obsession is a vestige of an outdated philosophy? what if biology, the so-called “queen of the sciences” in our modern era, simply refuses to play along?
this is the central paradox of contemporary philosophy of science: we want biology to behave like physics, yet it stubbornly resists our frameworks. in fact, one might argue that the search for “laws of biology” is a fundamentally misguided enterprise—one that tells us more about the ideological commitments of scientists and philosophers than about life itself.
why do we crave laws?
before we dissect the biological world’s refusal to conform, let’s ask a more basic question: why are we so obsessed with laws in the first place? the answer lies deep in the enlightenment’s epistemological project. from bacon to kant, thinkers equated knowledge with universality. to understand a phenomenon meant to uncover the rules that governed it—rules that were timeless, exceptionless, and universally applicable. in physics, this worked beautifully; in biology, not so much.
biology is the science of variation. the principle of natural selection, darwin’s greatest insight, rests upon the idea that differences drive evolution. but how does one reconcile variation with universal laws? the short answer is: one doesn’t. biology is a science of trends, tendencies, and statistical likelihoods—not absolutes.
the illusion of biological laws
some have tried to force biological generalizations into the mold of lawfulness. take the so-called “hardy-weinberg law,” which describes how allele frequencies remain stable under idealized conditions. sounds law-like, right? but here’s the catch: those “idealized conditions” rarely, if ever, exist in nature. natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and migration all disrupt the equilibrium. in other words, the law is only a law if reality is ignored.
consider another classic example: allometric scaling. geoffrey west and colleagues have argued that the metabolic rate of an organism scales to the 3/4 power of its mass, forming a biological law akin to newton’s laws of motion. but is this really a law? or is it just a statistical tendency? when one zooms in, exceptions abound: plants, microbes, and certain outlier mammals deviate from the so-called universal pattern.
what about mendel’s laws of inheritance? surely, they count as laws? not quite. while mendel’s work was groundbreaking, we now know that gene linkage, epigenetics, and horizontal gene transfer regularly violate his principles. in other words, mendel’s laws hold only under very specific circumstances—much like the hardy-weinberg equilibrium.
so what happens when “laws” require dozens of caveats, exceptions, and idealized conditions? at what point does a law become merely a heuristic—a useful approximation rather than an ontological truth?
contingency, complexity, and the fallacy of reductionism
perhaps the greatest argument against biological laws is history itself. gould’s famous “tape of life” thought experiment drives the point home: if we could rewind the evolutionary tape and let it play again, the results would likely be dramatically different. in contrast, if we were to rewind the tape of classical mechanics, the results would be identical. the difference? contingency.
evolution is a process of contingent events stacked upon one another, shaped by randomness, environmental upheavals, and unrepeatable historical circumstances. the rise of mammals over dinosaurs was not a foregone conclusion—it was an accident of history, sealed by an asteroid impact. if the contingency of history is so central to biology, then what place do laws have? laws are supposed to be timeless; evolution, by contrast, is the ultimate historical process.
but the problem runs even deeper. biological systems are not only contingent but also deeply complex. this complexity arises from the interactions of countless individual components, none of which behave predictably on their own. the gene-protein relationship, for example, is anything but straightforward—pleiotropy, epistasis, and gene-environment interactions ensure that outcomes remain probabilistic rather than deterministic.
this flies in the face of the reductionist dream that has dominated much of modern science. physicists and even some molecular biologists have long argued that biological phenomena will eventually be reduced to physical laws. but every attempt at such reduction has hit a wall. life, it seems, operates at a different ontological level—one where laws, at least in the classical sense, do not hold.
should we even care about laws?
given these challenges, a provocative question emerges: should we even care whether biology has laws? some philosophers argue that laws are an outdated way of thinking about science. instead of searching for exceptionless rules, we should focus on patterns, models, and explanations that work within specific contexts.
james woodward, for example, proposes that science is really about uncovering causal relations rather than discovering laws. a good explanation tells us how a system will behave under certain conditions—not necessarily that it will behave that way universally. sandra mitchell goes even further, arguing that we should replace the rigid notion of “laws” with pragmatic laws—generalizations that hold within well-defined, empirically supported domains but do not claim universality.
this perspective shifts the entire debate. instead of asking, “are there laws of biology?” we should ask, “how does biology explain the world?” this reframing liberates biology from the constraints of 19th-century positivism and allows it to function on its own terms—embracing contingency, complexity, and the richness of living systems.
conclusion: embracing the messiness of life
perhaps it’s time to abandon the fantasy that biology must conform to the neat, mathematical precision of physics. perhaps the very nature of life defies rigid, exceptionless rules. this doesn’t make biology a lesser science—if anything, it makes it the most exciting and dynamic field of all.
rather than forcing biology into an ill-fitting mold, we should embrace its messiness. life is not a machine, nor is it a deterministic system reducible to a few elegant equations. it is a complex, evolving, and unpredictable phenomenon. and that, perhaps, is what makes it worth studying in the first place.
reference:
hamilton, w. d. (2007). “narrow roads of gene land: the collected papers of w. d. hamilton, vol. 2.” oxford university press.
