Scientific progress specific to biology: An epistemological overview

Progresses in leading edge life sciences are undeniable, but there is more to it: from an epistemological perspective, they rest on a paradox vitalizing the very project of biology. Making our understanding of organic functioning all the more objective, life sciences yet exploit a paradigm which structurally rules out any opportunity to explain why biological phenomena are explainable the way we claim they are. As such a blind spot is constitutive of the disciplinary boundaries that condition and permit objective modelling, evolutions in scientists' mode of thought (i.e. paradigm shifts) may require at crucial points some interaction with epistemologists or historians of sciences. The model case of ontophylogenesis thus shows not only how such cooperation can be useful (both in normal science and in transitional contexts), but mostly why it plays a role in helping biology to get out of its intrinsic paradox. The most innovative feature of ontophylogenesis would thus be the following: to give account for the mode of intelligibility it chose by explaining it - in a truly Darwinian manner - in the core of the theory. Though this epistemic move definitely confirms biology to be an autonomous science as long as it faces its constitutive paradox, the methodological detour such realization implied would go through occasional interplay with “exclusively reflexive approaches” - that is to say, humanities.