ABSTRACT
A commonly accepted belief today among biologists is that all manifestations of life can ultimately be explained by the laws governing inanimate matter. This belief is often labeled mechanism or materialism. According to this view, the ultimate goal of the life sciences is to account for the origin and properties of life (and mind) by means of the principles of physics. Psychology is reducible to physiology (the machinery of brain), physiology (and biology) is reducible to chemistry and physics (the machinery of life), chemistry is reducible to physics. The complexity of the phenomena of life (and mind) comes from the complex organization of the large number of objects involved and not from the complexity of the fundamental laws governing the basic objects.
