Abstract

I will use the history of phage to focus on the issue of biological explanations; on the relationship between biology and physics; and on the historical problem of the disciplinary autonomy of biology, versus its reduction, which ultimately seeks to place it within the domain of the physical sciences. Paradoxically, the two physicists I focus on most, Neils Bohr and Max Delbrück, represent attempts to preserve the autonomy of biology, each in a very complex way. Once again the problematique here is the nature of biological systems as goal-oriented historical phenomena, that is, as teleological explanations rather than mechanistic accounts of life