Zašto trebamo znanje o obilježjima zakona u biologiji

Abstract

Nominally „bioethics“ should mean that one should take a consequent appraisal to all which is alive, and until now it is stressed that the philosophy of biology refers to biology (as the basis of bioethics) just in this sense. This is the reason for the question posed in the title.In the philosophy of biology there are contradictory understandings of what theselaws are – they are either understood as being causal or not, and hence, as something with a strictly general range, or in contrast, as something indetermined what may even lead to the negation of the existence of such laws in biology. However, if we take that the scope of scientific research is given by possibility with various probabilities, then we need a weaker notion of law in biology. Indeed, it is clear that in biology – as well as in other sciences – the principle of causality is a methodological principle for research and not one that functions as a deterministic theory, i.e. it does not claim a connection of general necessity, but only a causal conjuncture. In the first phase, a scientist studies the multiplicity of conditions which he tries to limit (Bechtel 1993, Glennan1996, Craver 2000). He analyzes the degrees of occurrence of the phenomena on different levels in the sense of functional relations (Cummins 1975,1983, Bechtel 1986, Craver 2001), what permits a classification in a spectrum of probability (Dawkins 2006) in the sense of the degree of strength of a law:

1.strong probability –

2.very high probability –

3.high probability : the entrenchment (Cummins 1983, Šustar 2007)

4.middle probability : the invariance (Woodward 2001)

5.lower probability : the stability (Mitchell 1997,2000)

6.low probability : the resilience (Skyrms 1977).

In the formal sense, in biology the Bayesian theory of probability is used, i.e. the evidential probability, especially the inductive form.The laws in biology are models (Sober 2000, Kokić 2010) and they function as paradigma. The acquaintance with the characteristics of laws in biology is important for bioethics in order to divuldge an appropriate knowledge about all which is alive and especially for the same biology in order to avoid the return to determinism.