Scope of the symposium

Contemporary philosophy of biology deals predominantly with evolutionary biology and, to a much lesser extent, with molecular biology. It is therefore concerned with a biology which is descriptive rather than predictive, a biology which asserts that an understanding of the living world will come from descriptions of the histories of organisms, in particular their genetic history, descriptions of the behaviour of organisms, and descriptions of the molecules out of which organisms are composed. We are of the opinion that this philosophy of biology is incomplete and therefore unsatisfactory. As yet it has no answer to the question of what distinguishes the living from the non-living, except to say that something lives because its ancestors lived. In its current state the philosophy of biology does not have the wherewithal to consider a single organism as an integrated, functionally organised system that can be understood per se, independent of its evolutionary history. The science of Systems Biology now confronts the philosophy of biology with this deficiency and we believe this challenge should be taken up. What sets systems biology apart from the rest of biology is that it aims to be able to ultimately predict systemic behaviours of organisms from their constituent processes by merging the molecular and cellular levels, rather than by describing them independently as is done in evolutionary and molecular biology. This surely has profound philosophical implications for biology as a whole.

Systems Biology is a vigorous and expanding discipline, in many ways a successor to genomics and perhaps unprecedented in its combination of biology with a great many other sciences, from physics to ecology, from mathematics to medicine, and from philosophy to chemistry. Precisely because it is at the interface of so many different scientific disciplines, the philosophical foundations of Systems Biology are either a mixture of the foundations of all contributing disciplines, or they comprise entirely new foundations emerging from the nonlinear interactions of all those disciplines, much as Systems Biology itself. In addition, studying the philosophical foundations of Systems Biology may resolve a longer standing issue, i.e. the extent to which Biology is entitled to its own scientific foundations rather than being dominated by existing philosophies. Whichever is the case, we are convinced that a sufficient number of controversial challenges exist to warrant both a symposium and a set of challenging publications on the philosophical foundations of Systems Biology.