EP60: How To Think About Biology with Dr. Dan Nicholson

This season we’ve been exploring the concept of mechanism in reproductive biology. We’ve chatted with scientists from across disciplines who are working to better understand how sperm, eggs, and embryos work. Over the next three episodes, we’ll be exploring the idea of mechanism itself. We’ll learn how the historical practice of biology has shaped the way we think about mechanisms today, how computing metaphors might supercede the machine metaphors that dominate in molecular biology, and how the fields of biology and physics might be on course to collide in the coming decades.   Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with the renown philosopher of biology, Dr. Dan Nicholson of George Mason University. Dan is a talented science communicator and recent author of the book “What is Life, Revisited”, in which he analyzes the motivations of Erwin Shrodinger’s famous 1944 lecture series and its impact on the nascent field of molecular biology. Dan’s introspective writing has changed the way I think about biology. It was a real joy to get to have this conversation with him. Our far-reaching conversation covered the role of philosophy in the practice of science, how and how not to think about organisms as machines, and the role of random variation in biological systems. Link to SSR Website: https://ssr.org/Link to Dr. Nicholson's Faculty Page: https://philosophy.gmu.edu/people/dnichoBook Link: "What is Life, Revisited": https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4