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New biology
At our Institute, we are mostly concerned with the new biology.
It is the scientific view that sees life in terms of coherent
(highly integrated) and self-organised processes. It does not
see organisms as imperfect molecular automata subject to extraneous
forces of selection; rather it sees them as highly coherent,
self-organised wholes, irreducible to their parts (organs,
tissues, cells, molecules...). In this view, basically molecular
processes in organisms are not only random, rather they are
at least partially organised an co-ordinated through a coherent
endogenous bioelectromagnetic field, possibly at a very broad
frequency span. The wholeness of the organism is thus not a
wishful dream, an illusion but a reality, based on a special
organismic (by some authors also called morphogenetic) field.
An increasing number of authors assumes that it may even have
a macroscopic quantum mechanical nature.
According to the new biology, life has its
own laws, besides the laws of physics and chemistry, namely
the laws of its coherent field and the laws pertaining to organism's
inner dynamic relations. The latter are researched intensively
by different approaches stemming mostly from the theories of
complex systems (see dynamic Boolean
networks).
If it is the task of the Neo-Darwinian and molecules-based biology
to explain life and organisms in terms of chemistry, physics
and various evolutionary forces (selection, mutation, random
genetic drift, gene conversion etc.), it is the primary task
of the new biology to explain life in terms of genuine biological
laws as well as principles and only secondary in the before mentioned
terms.
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