Dividing biology into disciplines: Chaos or multiformity?
✍ Scribed by P. Dullemeijer
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1980
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 376 KB
- Volume
- 29
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0001-5342
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
A good division of biology is important for clarity of thought, presentation of the problems and nowadays also for science policy. Various classifications are in use, depending upon different parameters. A division can be based on objects and on aspects. A modem classification on objects is based on the levels of organisation. Methodological principles play a role in the background.
Dividing biology into subdisciplines is not merely an amusing game, but the basis for management in a science policy and a necessity for theoretical biology. The introduction of a democratic consultation on topics of teaching and research in the institutes of higher learning requires a simple classification of disciplines. Managers, governing bodies and planners ask for a simple, transparent and easy-to-manipulate classification of disciplines, which is not likely to be subverted. Confronted, however, with the practice of classification and nomenclature, outsiders, to which managers usually belong, must get an impression of chaos and capriciousness, hampering the pursuit of a policy of setting priorities and selection.
The investigator has always been aware of the complexity of subdivisions, as a result of which it is immaterial to him what he is called, as long as his scientific efforts are respected and he can continue the research project of his choice. In fact, he intuitively feels that a rigid classification is rather a hindrance to research than a support. But exactly this free choice and the appreciation of his work are under discussion nowadays. Even the investigator must justify his doings in modern society. One course to take is to reach a consensus of classification of the necessary number of subdisciplines for research and teaching, in such a way that his particular work can fall within a subdiscipline.
A good classification is also needed for biology itself; the consistency of the biological theory largely depends on this classification, for it shows the * Lecture presented before the Netherlands Society for Theoretical Biology, Leiden,