Preface to DNA Habitats and Their RNA Inhabitants

When I turned my focus from debates on the philosophy of science to the philosophy of biology and life sciences in the mid-1980s, one of the most interesting things that struck me was that the results of these debates failed to penetrate any biological discipline. Yet biological disciplines have methods, methodological discussions, and a scientific history with developmental stages. Like all other scientific disciplines, they embrace basic research, definitions, and a historical process in the search for appropriate methods, scientific foundations, and justification. After 2000 years of metaphysics, in the early twentieth century a group of empiricists wanted to establish “exact science” and clearly delimitate scientific research and knowledge from metaphysics. Metaphysics assembles all those world views and paradigms of the past with which we are familiar from the history of philosophy. All of them propose a central paradigm as a basis for their system of thought, such as “all is one” or the contradictory one “all is many.” Essential to all of them is the basic proposition that their sentences about everything are depictions of the reality; that is, there is a stringent coherence between the sentence and the being. We know them as, for example, materialism, idealism, subjectivism, and objectivism applied to logic, knowledge theory, ontology, psychology, anthropology, natural philosophy, and other special disciplines. To identify metaphysics we simply have to look at their self-definition: they usually end in “–ism,” which indicates their claim to have access to the ultimate truth in terms of explaining reality that competing disciplines do not have. The vision of an exact science was a titanic endeavor to gain insight into the basics of material reality: the only thing we can be sure of is what our senses tell us; what our experiments show us; and empirical knowledge proved by reproducible experiments, measurements, and computations. In the future, exact science will insist on empirical foundations and results that represent material reality and not belief states or confusing theoretical constructions that cannot be proved empirically. Because both metaphysics as well as exact science depend on linguistic sentences to outline their ideas, the crucial question now is how to construct sentences that are scientific and not metaphysical. It is inevitable that we must use the sentences of a language to express observations and construct theoretical models. The interesting thing at this stage of discussion is that the basic delimitation between metaphysics and exact science from now on will need to focus on a language problem. Rather unexpectedly, the focus on basic research moved from things, beings, and senses to the essential requirement for its description, thoughts, and interpretation. Within the predominant paradigm, language was thought be a feature of material reality or, more exactly, material reality was built out of atoms and molecules—even language using biotic entities. Therefore, all beings are strictly subject to natural laws; physics is the leading science, and mathematical equations are the only appropriate tool for depicting physical reality. A breakthrough in science and scientific methodology seemed close, and philosophers were keen to solve the historical problem of metaphysical thinking. A scientific revolution in terms of the birth of a better world and true insights into nature seemed to be at hand.