Alfred J. Lotka

Rashevsky's mathematical biophysics was mostly concerned with microscopic biological processes within living organisms, such as cell division and nerve conduction.

In contrast, the Polish-American physical chemist Alfred J. Lotka focused on macroscopic population-level phenomena and developed his own version of a biological theory of everything.

His Elements of Physical Biology from 1924 was almost cosmological in scope, seeking to derive general laws of chemical dynamics of structured systems and the interactions between living organisms in terms of energy and matter.

Lotka saw evolution as an unfolding, irreversible transformation of the universe, and life itself as a large-scale chemical process.

In contrast, theoretical explanations in biology usually take the shape of a descriptive mechanism and do not appeal to universal laws.

Some doubt that natural laws are possible in biology at all as biological phenomena are historically contingent being the products of evolution.

Though to this one might retort, aren't the laws of physics and chemistry themselves cosmologically contingent the way biological laws and mechanisms are evolutionarily so? Philosophers of science have long pondered whether biological phenomena can be fully reduced to physical ones.

Waddington wrote that no conceptualization of a living system is complete, quote, "unless it includes at least four importantly different timescales, those of metabolism, development, heredity, and evolution." End quote.