Science and discipline

 People, if they think of biology at all, usually think of it as a science. It’s interesting if you look at biology as a discipline — meaning that you consider how biology is to be taken as a science and what kinds of questions count as scientifically worthwhile.

The discipline underwent revolutions in our lifetime. Edward O. Wilson tells about one of the revolutions that occurred after Francis Crick and James Watson were credited with discovering the structure of DNA in 1953. The discovery changed our understanding of the universe — but it also ignited a debate about what biology — the discipline — should be about.

Traditionally, biology departments taught a lot of courses organized around groups of animals and plants. Students took entomology for an introduction to insects, ichthyology for fish and ornithology for birds.

But there is another way of looking at living beings. You can look at them through different levels of organization. You can study life at the molecular level or cellular level, for example. At the other end of the scale, you can look at population levels.

You can look at the discipline of biology in different ways.

Crick and Watson’s work was so sensational all the research money went into molecular biology for a while. It seemed to be an investment in an enormous field that had hardly been touched. This emphasis showed up in the kinds of biologists universities hired and in the kinds of research that was funded. It showed up in the kinds of prizes offered.

The chemical and physical properties of living beings should be studied, of course. But those are not the only properties that living beings have.

If you get outside of the laboratory and into the field, you come across different kinds of properties that raise different questions. Wilson was interested in ants. Some ants live in small colonies with perhaps 100 workers. Other ants build nests that might include 15 million workers. The megacolonies, networks of connected nests, are so big it’s hard to fathom.

Why such differences among ants? And why do some kinds of ants live in some places and not others?

An analysis of proteins and enzymes is unlikely to tell you why certain kinds of animals are solitary creatures while others are highly social. If you are the kind of scientist that thinks real science limits itself to chemistry and physics, you’re going to ignore questions about how different plants and animals adapt to different habitats. You’re going to miss at least some of the questions about environmental damage.

Biology as a science seeks to find answers to questions about life. But biology as a discipline gets into a question of which questions are more important.

The scientists who try to answer the questions almost live different kinds of lives. Molecular biologists live in labs with increasingly sophisticated imaging technology. Wilson did most of his work with a hand lens.

If you are studying ecological relationships, you have to be able to identify plants and animals and at least have a basic understanding of the geology. If you’re studying the growth rates of cancer cells you need a different set of skills.

It sometimes seems miraculous to me that biologists try to talk to each other.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994.