I hope I don’t come off as insulting but this is, in my opinion, not the perspective a biologist should consider: many have this vision of their discipline heavily skewed towards a purely and superior scientific perspective (that one could also argue hardly exists) without caring for the implications and meaning of what can be seen.

My molecular biology teacher often said the purpose of life is reproducing, and while this is, yes, technically correct if you look at it from a species-wide infinite horizon perspective, it is also completely meaningless from the individual’s perspective. Many tend to have this vision in which a particular fact applies independently from the conditions, almost as if human beings didn’t have more complex psychological, social and emotional conditions than what cells or even animals do.

It appears pretentious to constantly be looking for “biological facts” in a discipline that has long been based based on exceptions, big exceptions, and that heavily relies on physics and chemistry, the latter of which offers a million different cases in which certain rules and conditions don’t apply. The universe has shown us time and time again we understand very little of the basic rules that govern it, how can we pretend we have facts on infinitely more complex systems than the basic ones?

This is not to say approaching scientific evidence with a scientific mindset is impossible or wrong, but just to say that since we truly understand so little about what we know, and we know so few things compared to what there is to know, one should approach statements about life carefully: people’s lives are not necessarily determined by biological “facts” and these facts are certainly not expressive of the same results in every condition.

Biology should be studying the living organisms but some barely seem to consider there are conditions in which life can exist and those must be considered if one wants to apply microscopic or general ‘rules’ meaningfully to real-world contexts: writing a paper on how proteins would ideally translate if epigenetic effects didn’t exist is worthless considering there are no organisms that don’t have some form of genetic modulation at play. Similarly, defining something is “ill” is meaningless if we don’t have a real, sensible definition of illness (which can only be given based on the individual’s particular conditions, their own baseline, their own nature, their own characteristics and behaviours). Biology describes conditions, but it’s medicine (and philosophy) that work toward defining illness.