Living systems are built, maintained and changed via processes in which complex structures and patterns emerge spontaneously as the result of many local interactions. Such processes are frequently referred to as self-assembly and self-organization and are typically described as the spontaneous formation of order from disorder. Self-assembly and self-organization play important roles in many life science fields ranging from molecular and developmental biology to neuroscience, ecology and evolutionary theory. These processes are important in explanations of phenomena such as protein folding, embryo development, cognition and collective animal behavior. Self-assembly has become a central concept in nano science and material science as a methodological approach to building functional materials.
Despite the significance of self-assembly and self-organization in many life science fields and explanatory frameworks, they have not so far gathered much attention within philosophy of science, self-assembly in particular. An important outset in the AssemblingLife project is that a comprehensive philosophical treatment of the idea of self-assembly in living systems as compared to and contrasted with self-organization, is needed and will give valuable advances both for philosophy of science and the sciences that frequently use these concepts.
To achieve such advances, the project combines conceptual investigation and epistemological analysis in close engagement with empirical sciences. The main objectives of the project are to
- provide a comprehensive philosophical account of self-assembly across fields and scales
- transform the philosophical understanding of life science explanations by using ideas of self-assembly and self-organization to challenge current theories, including interventionist and mechanist accounts of scientific explanation, and to develop new accounts of life science explanation.
- to develop an account of how we may understand the interaction between genetics and self-assembly processes and how we may integrate these different types of explanations
- to contribute new account of relations between scales/levels based on investigations of self-assembly and self-organization.
The results are expected to impact philosophy of science by contributing novel theories on central scientific concepts, on scientific explanation, on explanatory competition and integration, and on relations between levels/scales. The project is also expected to contribute to bridging reductionist and organizational accounts in biology and through these efforts, contribute to shifting how we view life and living systems. The project will impact natural sciences by providing systematic accounts of self-assembly and self-organization in a way that will provide an improved conceptual basis for conducting research, which in turn can impact research questions, research agendas and interpretations of results in empirical research.
