ABSTRACT
One of the most extensive discussions of the epistemological problems confronting cell biologists has been supplied by Elsasser whose views have had a rather wide audience. Elsasser is greatly to be admired for his insistence that biologists confront the epistemological problems of their science, and for his efforts to analyze those problems, which he feels center in incapacity to know the quantum microstate of an organism. Elucidation of this problem must surely be an integral part of increasing the capacity of molecular biology to cope effectively with the developmental biology of metazoans. The thesis Elsasser wishes to establish is the semi-autonomy of biology, by which he specifically means that organisms exhibit regularities which cannot, in principle, be deduced from quantum mechanics. In trying to establish that this autonomy of biology is possible, Elsasser uses two central concepts: Bohr’s Generalized Complementarity and his own Principle of Finite Classes.
