Argument 1: We will never understand life by evolving it from initial conditions, no matter how well we understand the fundamental laws. What is needed to incorporate biology into physics and cosmology is a combination of reductionist and functionalist explanations. Neither alone suffices.
Argument 2. During the roughly 3.8 billion years that life on Earth has taken to evolve to its present state, the Universe has grown and altered significantly. Thus, the methodological arguments should get their relevance from the conspicuous and suggestive fact that the life emerges and evolves on cosmological timescales.
Argument 3: The the number of types of living organism that could exist, even if the Universe were crammed full of life, is vastly smaller than the number of organisms that could be coded in DNA or RNA or catalyzed and built with proteins. The state space is then extraordinary sparsely occupied.
Argument's 2 & 3 Source: Biocosmology: Biology from a cosmological
perspective, Marina Cortˆes, Stuart A. Kauffman
Not really. Biology is already a legitimate, highly respected science but cosmology will be entirely replaced in the coming decade. Theories of biology might have a few errors, but Big Bang cosmology is almost entirely wrong and and false in almost every respect.
Yes, we presently have no good acknowledged theory of abiogenesis, but we will come up with much better theories in the coming decades IMO.
Research Proposal Relatively simple answers to almost all the Well-Known and L...
Forrest Noble,
Biology is legitimate but not as a science in the realm of cosmology, as a science of living organisms and ecosystems.
I'm not sure what you're aiming for, with "to incorporate biology into physics and cosmology".
Cosmology works, with or without biological life.
Life needed a somewhat cosmological timescale with successive generations of stars, to produce the necessary distribution of elements heavier than Helium.
Intelligent life then needed a longer cosmological timescale to evolve into us.
So...they're "incorporated" in the sense of a one-way dependence. Isn't that enough?
Mr Ray Butler,
I think what you say has merit -it encapsulates the current thinking about the topic.
However, there is this new idea/hypothesis that I summarized above that posits that life as one of the highlights of cosmic development should hold a prominent role in the explanation of cosmic evolution /creation based on the premise of "the highlight" and if this is to be promoted then biology, which explains life better than physics, should play a more important role other than a add-on for the layer of living processess of those evolutionary artifacts that standard non biological informed evolution explains, to the existing physics cosmology's-based framework
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Bioecology
- Systems Ecology
- Landscape Ecology
- Connectivity