Sep 24, 2026 · 42 min · 9 segments
Biology is often seen as a primarily experimental science, with theory serving merely to generalize patterns from empirical data. But history reveals that theory plays a more generative role in the…
At the beginning of his famous lectures on physics, Richard Feynman describes experiment as the foundation of empirical science and shows where theory enters into scientific practice.
Quote, "The test of all knowledge is experiment.
Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.
But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are be-- that are to be tested come from? Experiment itself helps to produce these laws in the sense that it gives us hints.
But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations, to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.
This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics.
There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws but do not experiment.
And then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess." End quote.
In biology, by contrast, theory and experiment seem to be more entwined and are usually practiced by the same scientists.
And yet, in a provocatively titled twenty fourteen article, Biology is More Theoretical than Physics, systems biologist Jeremy Gunawardena challenged this view about the relationship between biological theories and experiments.
He made a case for a number of biological entities that were postulated, imagined to exist theoretically long before they were discovered experimentally in a division of labor similar to that described by Feynman for physics.
These theorized entities include such fundamental concepts as genes, receptors, enzymes, ion channels, and tumor suppressors.
But even more impressive are the theories that predicted entire mechanisms of biological processes and deciphered fundamental principles of life itself way ahead of their experimental demonstration.
Among them are the genetic code, the chemiosmotic theory, and the clonal selection theory of adaptive immunity.
Some of these theories emerged untethered to experimental evidence and yet proved correct, while others were developed in a tighter feedback loop with experimental work.
Still, theoretical biology doesn't seem to have attained the same standing and institutional support that is granted to theoretical physics or, for that matter, other fields that study complex systems, such as economics.
I've long wondered why this is.
A look at the history of ideas in theoretical biology offers an answer.
Theoretical biology encompasses a surprising variety of subdisciplines, ranging from biosemiotics to modern systems biology.
This variety is a testament to the soaring imagination of biologists in their attempts to make sense of the living world, and at the same time to their persistent desire to model biological theories on the more established and successful theories in physics.
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.
At the beginning of his famous lectures on physics, Richard Feynman describes experiment as the foundation of empirical science and shows where theory enters into scientific practice.
Quote, "The test of all knowledge is experiment.
Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.
But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are be-- that are to be tested come from? Experiment itself helps to produce these laws in the sense that it gives us hints.
But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations, to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.
This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics.
There are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws but do not experiment.
And then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess." End quote.
In biology, by contrast, theory and experiment seem to be more entwined and are usually practiced by the same scientists.
And yet, in a provocatively titled twenty fourteen article, Biology is More Theoretical than Physics, systems biologist Jeremy Gunawardena challenged this view about the relationship between biological theories and experiments.
He made a case for a number of biological entities that were postulated, imagined to exist theoretically long before they were discovered experimentally in a division of labor similar to that described by Feynman for physics.
These theorized entities include such fundamental concepts as genes, receptors, enzymes, ion channels, and tumor suppressors.
But even more impressive are the theories that predicted entire mechanisms of biological processes and deciphered fundamental principles of life itself way ahead of their experimental demonstration.
Among them are the genetic code, the chemiosmotic theory, and the clonal selection theory of adaptive immunity.
Some of these theories emerged untethered to experimental evidence and yet proved correct, while others were developed in a tighter feedback loop with experimental work.
Still, theoretical biology doesn't seem to have attained the same standing and institutional support that is granted to theoretical physics or, for that matter, other fields that study complex systems, such as economics.
I've long wondered why this is.
A look at the history of ideas in theoretical biology offers an answer.
Theoretical biology encompasses a surprising variety of subdisciplines, ranging from biosemiotics to modern systems biology.
This variety is a testament to the soaring imagination of biologists in their attempts to make sense of the living world, and at the same time to their persistent desire to model biological theories on the more established and successful theories in physics.
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.
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