Excerpt:
In retrospect, the sixth decade of the nineteenth century was truly remarkable with respect to the development of the science of biology. By the end of those ten years all of the pieces were in place for the maturation of what had been a purely observational discipline into one with a strong theoretical basis. The key elements of what would become modern biology had been discovered and formulated. However, it took more than eighty years to bring all of them together (1). The result, the field of molecular biology and its attendant sub-disciplines, is grounded philosophically in a mechanistic, deterministic and reductionist view that derives from the logical empiricist setting in which it was born and which has not changed, despite the radical shift that has come about in the physical sciences.