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Interviewer(s)
Art Woods, Marty Martin
Interviewee(s)
Dan Nicholson
Description
Why shouldn’t we think of living things as machines? What is and what isn’t an organism?
In this episode, we talk to Dan Nicholson, a philosopher and biologist from George Mason University about his new edited volume, "Everything Flows: Toward a Processual Philosophy of Biology". In it, he and colleagues argue that biological systems more resemble flames and tornadoes and other dynamically stable systems than clocks or other human-designed things. Dan thinks that life is better understood as flows of energy and matter, which means that trying to reduce biological things into smaller parts, a popular practice in biology known as reductionism, will ultimately fail because it misses the stream-like nature of life. In the show today, we discuss these ideas, what Dan calls a processual philosophy for biology, including what it means for evolution, medicine, and more.
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
Date Published
4-2022
Language
eng
Length of Episode
1 hour, 32 minutes, 8 seconds
Digital File Format
audio/mp3
Document Type
Podcast
Recommended Citation
Woods, Art and Martin, Marty, "Episode 082: Organisms are not machines" (2022). BigBiology Podcasts. 83.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/83