Epistemic cultures

Through this examination, it might be possible to also address a more fundamental question: Can biology be as compressible and comprehensible as physics? Or are biological systems unique in their complexity in that they do not lend themselves to compact theoretical description in the manner of physical systems? Though the ultimate answers to these questions still remain out of reach, it turns out that there are, in fact, surprising commonalities between the models that describe the behavior of both physical and biological systems.

This first section is called The Varieties of Theoretical Biology.

Theoretical explanations of biological phenomena date back to the early days of natural philosophy, but the notion of theoretical biology as a distinct field of inquiry is much more recent, originating in the early twentieth century.

As the zoologist William A. Losie wrote in his nineteen oh eight book, Biology and Its Makers, quote, "In the rise of biology, the facts have accumulated constantly through observation and experiment, but the general truths have emerged slowly and periodically whenever there has been granted to some mind an insight into the meanings of the facts.

Still, sometimes sophisticated foundation models fail to outperform far simpler statistical models.

The models are surely learning something about the biological systems that they're trained on, but how much that constitutes theoretical understanding and how it can be made intelligible to human scientists remains an open question.

This final section is called Epistemic Cultures.

The history of theoretical biology has abundantly shown that theory building in biology has been at least as fertile and consequential in the process of discovery as it has been in physics.