ABSTRACT
What we are trying to do at these Symposia is to bring into being a not yet existent academic discipline of THEO R ET I CAL BIOLOGY. This should exist in the same sort of way that Theoretical Physics does today. That is to say, not, of course, as a closed body of doctrine with all the questions neatly answered. A few decades ago some biologists wrote as though they thought that physics was in this condition. and had in fact revealed the fundamental laws of physics and the basic constituents of matter. It is doubtful if physicists themselves ever thought this. and they certainly do not at the present time. They have. of course, many profound theorems such as quantum mechanics, but as we heard from David Bohm, it is by no means generally accepted as the final word of physics. Again the physicists know many 'fundamental particles', but now that they are looking inside the nucleus they are turning out new fundamental particles at the rate of several a year. It is very clear that they do not yet know the fundamental constituents of matter and it is becoming more and more probable that there are no such things, but that the material universe is open-ended to investigation in both directions towards the very small (sub-nuclear) and towards the very large (cosmological). The recognition of this largely removes the point of trying to distinguish between vitalist and mechanist theories of biology, where vital ism is defined as the notion that the objectively observable behaviour of living systems demands the postulation of entities not contemplated by the laws of physics. Since we do not know in full what entities are demanded by the laws of physics, the distinction is more or less inapplicable. The question to ask about biological theory is not whether it is vitalist or mechanist, but whether it is a useful scientific theory or not. Many useful biological theories cannot yet be expounded in terms of conventional physics. e.g. conditioned reflex learning, and genetics could not be until about 1960 at earliest.
