On the Prospects of Theoretical Biology: Life in the Universe as an Anomaly, a Puzzle, and a Counterinstance

Abstract That there are living organisms and life is an empirical fact of the Universe. In the present paper, I discuss three different ways of relating this fact to the fundamentals of natural science. Each may be associated with a respective historical epoch such that, in a nutshell, by the early twentieth century, life had become a well-delineated anomaly apparently conflicting with the fundamentals; in the latter half of the same century and especially due to molecular biology, it came to be viewed as a puzzle which in spite of the anomalous appearance could be “explained”; finally, in the present-century context of system- and organism-level problems, it is, perhaps, in order to consider whether life might be best approached as a counterinstance, whose proper assimilation may require a more profound revision of the fundamentals themselves. This analysis, if valid, suggests to rethink the status for theoretical biology in science. The paper closes by discussing a particular example-proposal that relates the basic problems of theoretical biology on the one hand to the foundations of natural science, and on the other to the current afterthought of mechanistic molecular biology and gene-centric views of evolution.