A model of biological indeterminacy

Joseph P. Zbilut, Alessandro Giuliani

Dhia Bouktila

The classical deterministic worldview that dominated science from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century has been profoundly challenged by developments in modern physics and biology. Quantum mechanics has revealed that indeterminacy and probability are not merely epistemic limitations, but intrinsic features of physical reality. At the same time, evolutionary biology has shown that random genetic variation, filtered by natural selection, is the fundamental driver of biological diversity and adaptation. This article explores the conceptual parallel between quantum indeterminacy and evolutionary randomness, not as a reduction of biology to physics, but as an epistemological reflection on how stability and order emerge from probabilistic processes across different levels of organization. By examining emergence, contingency, historical irreversibility, and the limits of prediction, the paper argues that determinism is best understood as a scale-dependent approximation rather than a foundational ontological principle. The absence of finality in nature does not imply chaos or nihilism, but invites a renewed philosophical understanding of explanation, responsibility, and scientific humility in a probabilistic universe.

Charlotte Werndl

William G. Pollard

A suggestion of Bohr's to the effect that numerous situations exist among the life sciences and the social sciences which exhibit characteristics of complementarity strikingly parallel to those of quantum physics is developed further in this paper. The supposition is advanced that there may exist for biological systems inherent relations of indeterminacy between sets of observable properties of such systems analogous to the Heisenberg indeterminacy relations between canonically conjugate pairs of observables in quantum mechanics. The existence of such indeterminacies would be manifested, as it is in physical systems, in disturbances, uncontrollable in principle, produced when such systems interact with instruments and apparatus used to gain information about them. The fact that radical disturbances, whether incidental or inherent, accompany the process of observation in the life sciences is, of course, quite obvious. If a well-defined portion of such disturbances should turn out to be inherent, indeterminacy and probability would be introduced into biological phenomena as basic elements. Further progress in scientific explanation and synthesis of knowledge in these fields would then require a redefinition of the state of a biological system analogous to the necessity for using quantum ψ-functions for specifying the state of a physical system with the attendant possibility of wholly new insights, such as those in physics which ultimately depend on the symmetry properties of ψ-functions. This new, and presently unknown, scheme for specifying the state of biological systems would then presumably result in the typically complementary aspects of phenomena in these fields to which Bohr has called attention. A number of familiar examples of apparently complementary phenomena among the biological and social sciences are described, and the possibility that they may arise from inherent indeterminacies basic to the systems which exhibit these phenomena is considered. It is concluded that these considerations lead to the expectation that an approach along such lines in future investigations in the life sciences holds considerable promise, and that the physics teacher is in a unique position to assist in stimulating such an approach and in pointing out by analogy the means at each stage which are likely to prove best suited for carrying it through.

Koenraad Kortmulder

Albert Bachem

Heisenberg's (3) principle of indeterminacy or uncertainty has led most theoretical physicists and philosophers to two important steps: 1) the denunciation of the law of physical causality; 2) the decision of biological and psychological problems in favor of indeterminism.