Monday, 12.11.2012, 18:00 - 19:30
Gilman Building, room 449
It has become customary to regard the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This mechanical understanding is what justifies the belief in the sufficiency of explanatory reductionism in molecular biology, and it also lies at the heart of the theoretical appeal to design charts and circuit diagrams in systems and synthetic biology. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methodologies traditionally used in cell biology. Much of what we know about cells was derived from static snapshots of fixed or stained biological structures generated by conventional microscopical techniques. The interpretation of these snapshots naturally led to an understanding of subcellular architecture in terms of clockworks and molecular machines. However, the introduction and use of novel methodologies, such as fluorescence-based in vivo imaging techniques, is leading to the rapid accumulation of experimental data inconsistent with the classic machine conception of the cell. In this talk I will argue that this new image of the cell puts into question our intuitive adherence to classic mechanicist tenets like determinism, linear causation, and the reliance on design as an explanatory principle, and requires us to adopt an alternative philosophical framework capable of making theoretical sense of the inherent stochasticity and non-linearity of subcellular processes, as well as the self-organizing nature of cellular system.
Chair: Leo Corry