James Watson, of Watson & Crick fame, once said that “There is only one science: physics. Everything else is social work.” In Naturalist E.O. Wilson recounts the intellectul war that broke out in Harvard’s biology department in the 1960s between the molecularists and the more traditional organismic biologists. The result was that the life sciences at Harvard were split down the middle between an organismic and a molecular department.
I have always found it rather ironic that Wilson reacted so angrily to Watson’s dismissals of organismic biology, as Watson’s reductionism was channeled by Wilson 10 years later during the sociobiology controversy, where the latter declared boldy that social science would be reduce to a branch of biology. The conflict between molecularists and organismic biologists is also reflected in the career of Lynn Margulis, who pioneered the theories that symbiogensis of porkaryotic organisms resulted in the development of the eukaryotic cell. Margulis once said that “Like a sugary snack that temporarily satisfies our appetite but deprives us of more nutritious foods, neo-Darwinism1 sates intellectual curiosity with abstractions bereft of actual details — whether metabolic, biochemical, ecological, or of natural history.” Margulis had a thorough training in evolutionary biology and mathematical modelling under James Crow. Watson’s undergraduate background was in zoology, the field that he would assail after his triump with Crick.
But science eventually fills in its gaps, and I notice that Watson wrote in his preface to Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era that perhaps the time has come to seriously examine the nature of organisms now that many (though not most!) of their molecular foundations have been more firmly elucidated. And of course there are many theorists today who study evolution on the level of DNA base pairs, fusing the theoretical assumptions of evolutionary biology with empirical models drawn from molecular data.
1 – She is speaking here of the Modern Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, which is generally considered the fusing of population genetics rooted in Mendelian assumptions with traditional Darwinian evolutionary biology, with a smattering of supplements from ecology and paleontology. Most of the process was completed before the molecular revolution.
Posted by razib at 01:23 PM