Seeking Biology

I grew up in a family of engineers and experienced skepticism from folks around me about biology as real science. The "real" seemed to apply for math, physics and chemistry. Being quite deplorable at biology myself, I never got to the point where I could hold an informed opinion. My family and social network followed a well established pattern of thinking. For centuries, our understanding of reality has been dominated by the Newtonian paradigm. It calls for a vision of the universe as a giant clockwork machine unfolding according to fixed, deterministic laws. Newton’s framework taught us to identify key variables, write universal laws, and define the relevant phase space in advance, a recipe that works spectacularly well for classical physics and even underpins modern quantum theory, which, despite its probabilistic elements, still operates within fixed phase spaces and deterministic evolution of probability. This worldview brought structure and predictability but subtly implied that everything, even apparent randomness, was just a matter of incomplete knowledge.

Yet, biology quietly refuses to fit this mold. The evolution of life on Earth shows us a system that perpetually reinvents itself in ways no set of pre-written equations can capture. The biosphere is not a static assembly of predetermined possibilities. Organisms continuously repurpose their environment, invent new uses, and bring genuinely novel adaptations into being, forever expanding what is possible. This evolutionary creativity can’t be encompassed by a fixed phase space or predetermined variables; instead, it demonstrates that order, complexity, and meaning arise through open-ended, unpredictable processes. The emergence of new species, ecological interactions, and traits are not only beyond prediction but can’t even be fully specified in advance.

The realization that life and perhaps reality itself transcends reductionist, law-bound frameworks has profound implications for science and philosophy. Rather than seeking a “theory of everything” grounded solely in physics, we may need to embrace the unpredictable, self-creating aspects of biological evolution as a fundamental feature of reality. Creativity, emergence, and surprise become central threads in the fabric of existence, inviting us to see biology not as a messy specialization, but potentially as the true key to understanding how the universe invents, adapts, and flourishes beyond the boundaries of deterministic laws.