CONCEPT
The Autonomy of Biology
Mayr's five-decade campaign against the reduction of biology to physics — not separation but irreducibility, grounded in the specific fact that living systems have histories that physical laws alone cannot derive.
Ernst Mayr fought a sustained intellectual campaign, lasting the better part of five decades, against a single idea: that biology is reducible to physics. The campaign was the organizing principle of his philosophy of science — the thread connecting his work on systematics, his role in the Modern Synthesis, and his explicit arguments about what kind of science biology actually is. His position was not that physics was wrong about biological systems (it is not) but that physical description alone is insufficient. Living systems have histories. A species is not a configuration of atoms but a lineage, shaped by a unique, unrepeatable sequence of selection events and contingent accidents. Physics cannot derive the polar bear from first principles, because the polar bear is a story, and stories require historical explanation that physics, by its nature, does not provide.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The reductionist position takes a specific form in artificial intelligence research: intelligence is computation.