“Natural philosophy was distinguished from the other precursor of modern science, natural history, in that the former involved reasoning and explanations about nature (and after Galileo, quantitative reasoning), whereas the latter was essentially qualitative and descriptive.” [Wikipedia, with some additional discussion.]

There is no worse death knell for an article in molecular biology than being assessed as “too descriptive”. It’s hard to even find a place to publish gene expression patterns – it being so demeaning, and considered so easy, that certain journals have decided to make spin-offs devoted to just such descriptions, which are only useful to a few taken individually, and probably dilute the impact factor of the parent journal.

I don’t have a real problem with this – at least there are still vehicles for publication. I am sorry, though, to see shoddy minimal spatiotemporal assessments. If you’re going to look at a gene, try to look at it in as broad an age and tissue span as you can, so one could potentially develop some hypotheses as to its function.

Our group recently picked the opposite approach, getting as close as we could to identifying absolutely every gene transcript made in one cell type at one developmental stage. It would take a lot of work to get a picture of a whole organism like that (but it was an important cell type).

Such molecular descriptive approaches are the natural history of developmental biology. After saying “these cells move here next to those” and “when they do, they and their neighbors become this and that, respectively” for some hundred years or more, developmental biologists need not be on the defensive when describing what amounts to the ecosystem of the cells making up an embryo.

I am reading the excellent The Intelligibility of Nature by Peter Dear, which was favorably reviewed in our host journal, among other places. I’ve not made it all the way through; thought-provoking books go slow in my household. But it puts context to the delight I felt when contemplating Linnaeus’s still-blue delphinium among stacks and stacks of specimens, in the vault at the London Linnean Society (thanks to Matt Wood and his connections).

For natural philosophers in the century after Newton, knowing how to classify or name something correctly was a way of understanding it; classification was itself a form of knowledge.

The problems encountered by static taxonomy are the same that are currently facing such tools as the Gene Ontology, where by virtue of defining a controlled, finite vocabulary to describe a gene and the function(s) of its product(s), anyone who makes use of it is dooming their classification of a list of genes to instant outdatedness. But it is a noble attempt.

The principle of The Intelligibility of Nature is that we scientists are split between a desire to understand, what I would say is our inner philosopher, and the desire to be utilitarian, our inner engineer. When I like to be able to name a flower I observe in the garden (in French or English), I feel like I understand it by virtue of its relationship to other living organisms. It’s not particularly useful that I do so. I’ve been told a number of times that it is nice for me that I work in developmental biology in a hospital context where I can apply my knowledge to better understanding birth defects. But I was naturally drawn to that. I will be giving a conference for the public on Thursday evening about something along these lines, and will have to get my thoughts together to demonstrate not only that I love what I do, but that it is worthwhile to taxpayers for me to do it.