The limits of biology are practical, rather than theoretical, although some biological problems are so difficult, that it seems unlikely that we’ll be ever able to solve them. Among these problems, I will select the following:
·
The origin of life. The possibility
of replicating an experiment is one of the fundamental principles of scientific
method, as it is applied in the experimental sciences. No discovery is
considered valid until it has been confirmed by an independent team. If
an experiment cannot be replicated, it is not considered scientific.
The origin of life took place only once in the history of the Earth. Obviously, it cannot be replicated. Therefore, it is not a scientific fact, but a historical fact. Historic facts are treated in a different way than scientific facts: documents are sought that confirm that the fact did happen and describe how it happened. The credibility of these documents is then estimated. In the case of the origin of life, the documents would be fossil remains, but it’s practically impossible to find them, so it’s very likely that this problem will never be solved.
On
the other hand, the problem is complicated because some biologists think that
life appeared before cells, that there was a chemical evolution
acting on nucleic acids and proteins before these substances were enclosed in a
membrane.
What
if we were able some day to create life in the laboratory? Perhaps, but this
would not solve the problem of the origin of life, for we cannot be sure that
this is how life arose spontaneously, a few million years after the origin of
the Earth.
· Intelligent design or random evolution. In my opinion, this is not a scientific problem. The dilemma whether God exists or not, on the creation of the universe by an intelligent being or its spontaneous appearance (starting from what?) is a metaphysical question that science will never solve.
·
Brain, mind, conscience and free will.
The study of the human brain has come a long way in the last two decades, but doesn’t
seem to be nearer to discovering what is conscience (self-awareness) and why it
arises. Many neuroscientists start from the statement (unproven, but asserted
once and again) that consciousness is an epiphenomenon that automatically
emerges from the sparks of billions of neurons, but this hypothesis has not
been confirmed. The alternative is to assert that consciousness does not arise
from matter, in a reductionist or emergent way.
As
for the problem of free will, along with the arrow of time, it is one of the
two scientific-philosophical problems that
modern science seems incapable of addressing. Materialist philosophies, which
hold that freedom is an illusion, fight against alternative explanations that
start from the undeniable fact that we do have free will. Present-day
materialists should not be as sure of themselves as they appear, for determinism,
which seemed dominant in the 19th century, was ignominiously banished by the
successive blows it received from 20th-century science. But some people refuse to
know. We can also remind Penrose's suggestion, mentioned in
a previous post: that human intelligence may be qualitatively different
from computing machines.
· Will illness and death ever be vanquished? Medicine is one of the oldest arts and sciences in history. Its goal has always been fighting disease and death. Despite the great advances in medicine in the last two centuries, this has always been a losing battle. Just one disease (smallpox) has been completely eradicated. It is true that many others can now be cured, therefore the average duration of human life has increased, but our maximum life span remains the same. Even so, the media and some scientists doing futurology are very excited at the possibility of completely defeating death in the very near future.
Some inklings, however, seem to indicate that the
maximum duration of human life may be limited. And we may never cross that
limit, if new diseases, such as AIDS and COVID-19, continue to appear.
Some scientists believe that we will conquer death
when strong artificial intelligence will be attained, and we’ll be able to download
our consciousness, memory and personal characteristics into a computer or a
robot. But if
we don't know what is consciousness, how can we download it?
And there is an additional problem: if it were
possible to live forever, would we want it? Fictional literature tends to answer
negatively. See, for instance, the story The immortals, by Jorge Luis Borges, included in his collection The aleph, 1949. And remember that, if immortality were
feasible, we must give up reproduction, or alternatively we must conquer the
entire galaxy, which would just mean to postpone the problem.
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