Life as History: The Perpetual Dichotomy of Biology

Abstract Scientific disciplines traditionally are defined by their subject matter. In turn, they engage specific methodologies and scientific approaches that are familiar to those that are engaged in their study. Biological sciences however constitute an exception. They engage methodologies that have been developed for the natural sciences, but their subject matter is more relevant to humanities, especially history. The distinctive point that creates this discordance is the integration of notions such as randomness and stochasticity. In traditional natural sciences, limiting them signifies progress by improved methodologies and theories. In biological sciences they are increasingly appreciated as integral components of its subject matter. Relevant to this is also their predictive power. In the former, rendering predictions was constantly seen as validation of the theory by deduction. In biology, the focus on prediction is reduced, and what persists is the retrospective validation of past event and the appreciation of the impact of stochasticity, historicity, and subjectivity. These differences are reflected to the inability, and indeed the abandonment of rendering predictions as a goal for biology, and more recently as well as in other times in history, to the politically – and culturally inflicted - re-evaluation of what both the goals and the method of biomedical research should be.