Process Biology

Since around 500BCE, when Heraclitus declared that everything changes while Parmenides maintained that everything stays the same, the dichotomy of process and substance has been at the heart of Western philosophy. However, the view of Parmenides translated into Democritean atomism has provided the philosophy that has guided science since the seventeenth century. The thesis of the book that I plan to write is that this was a profound philosophical mistake, especially for the life sciences. In biology (including medicine) everything does indeed change, and the attempt to represent life as a hierarchy of thing-like entities formed into quasi-mechanisms has been increasingly misleading. The book will explain why this is such a serious mistake and also explore some of the benefits that could accrue for a biology that took seriously the fundamentally and pervasively processual character of life.