Before Lamark biology seems to have lacked unifying principles to address its central questions.
Before Linnaeus it lacked unifying principles.… But after Linnaeus, we have categorized everything.
...By which I mean to suggest, I think we might be miscommunicating about the questions at hand… If a post-Linnaean biologist is looking back and saying “sure, we had lots of information about species, but we didn’t have a conceptual scheme; now we do, so we are no longer confused about biology”, then the problem isn’t that ze is wrong that a big advance happened, but rather that ze is… failing to imagine that there could be major future insights, after which the prior state of knowledge would seem fundamentally conceptually impoverished.
I think that a biologist in 1900 is confused about several fundamental things about life. For example, they don’t know about GRNs. My guess would be that biologists in 2026 are also confused that way. I wouldn’t know specifically what they are confused about, but for example they may lack concepts of [metastable self-reinforcing gene regulatory states] or [bundle structures within the space of biological functions corresponding to characters such as cross-species-hands and cross-species-eyes and cross-species-T-cells]. (You would definitely find papers about both of those topics, and probably lots of other interesting theoretical topics in biology, but I’m saying it would be unsatisfactory, where it could eventually be satisfactory.)
Before Linnaeus it lacked unifying principles.… But after Linnaeus, we have categorized everything.
...By which I mean to suggest, I think we might be miscommunicating about the questions at hand… If a post-Linnaean biologist is looking back and saying “sure, we had lots of information about species, but we didn’t have a conceptual scheme; now we do, so we are no longer confused about biology”, then the problem isn’t that ze is wrong that a big advance happened, but rather that ze is… failing to imagine that there could be major future insights, after which the prior state of knowledge would seem fundamentally conceptually impoverished.
I think that a biologist in 1900 is confused about several fundamental things about life. For example, they don’t know about GRNs. My guess would be that biologists in 2026 are also confused that way. I wouldn’t know specifically what they are confused about, but for example they may lack concepts of [metastable self-reinforcing gene regulatory states] or [bundle structures within the space of biological functions corresponding to characters such as cross-species-hands and cross-species-eyes and cross-species-T-cells]. (You would definitely find papers about both of those topics, and probably lots of other interesting theoretical topics in biology, but I’m saying it would be unsatisfactory, where it could eventually be satisfactory.)