Biological Sciences and Physics Unified: Internal Evolution and Emergent Bound Box Theory

Abstract:

Why are there several sciences instead of only one? Are higher "levels of organization" reducible to "the most fundamental" one, physics? Should we try to do so now that we have the required tools? How could our ancestors discover thousands of years ago, drug-leads that we still rely on, like opioids; yet we, with incomparably advanced equipment and knowledge, are desperate to do so? Why has biology, e.g., neuroscience and genomics, failed in unraveling the workings of organisms despite spending billions of hours and dollars on gathering data? Why can't we even "reproduce" our results? I show that the current ontological and methodological attitudes toward biological phenomena are flawed. I present emergent bound box theory by following the second law of thermodynamics and selection's simple core: truism-law-of-survival. It explains the evolution of organisms' internal workings and provides the first ab initio (from-first-principles) scientific framework for biological sciences, including medical, psychological, and social sciences. It is backed up by diverse evidence from Shannon and integrated information theories, computational complexity, decoherence and quantum Darwinism, effective field theories, deep learning, stability of strange attractors, and discovering that despite decades of dominance, the share of reductionist "rational" drug design from all approved drugs is about 9% or even far less because most of these supposedly "target-based" drugs have numerous "off-target" therapeutic mechanisms. New outlooks appear toward long-debated dilemmas: machine metaphor of organisms; the "replication crisis"; Ockham's razor, simplicity, "beauty," and truth; tautology problem and a new synthesis of Darwinism; definition and origin of "life"; Laplace's demon; emergence; "downward causation"; "intelligent design"; and skepticism and the post-truth. I demonstrate applying the framework for COVID-19 by a machine learning-based cheminformatics meta-analysis using systematic review and interactome-wide consensually docked 4D-QSAR. I discuss how mistaking products of science for science has led to rote science, useless education, intellectual exclusion, and an illusion of progress. I clarify what "philosophy" and "science" are, and explain that contrary to the appearance, our scientific progress, compared to our resources, is at an all-time low in history. This, if not attended to, can soon lead to the extinction of human global civilization.

Supplementary Data 1: Detailed Discovery Origins of All Approved Drugs with Emphasis on Their Original Reporting Articles and Other Accounts of the Discoverers Themselves

Supplementary Data 2: "Off-Target" Therapeutic Mechanisms of "Target-Based" Drugs: Rationality or Luckiness?