Regulation and the Normativity Problem

ABSTRACT

The concept of regulation pervades biology, for example in models of genetic regulatory networks and the endocrine system. Regulation has a normative opposite, dysregulation, which figures prominently in biomedical models of disease. The use of normative concepts in biology, however, has been thought to present some challenges for the physicalist view of the world, and various resolutions have been proposed. Up to now the problem of biological normativity has been debated largely in connection with the concept of biological information. In this paper we shift focus to the concept of biological regulation, proposing that it provides a promising new approach to these issues. Models of regulatory systems have several features: they are causal, but they do not deal with the energy exchanges and transformations covered by physics and chemistry; further, and entirely connected, regulatory systems can break down, and this is because they and their causal-regulatory properties are dependent on fragile molecular structures. Biological regulatory systems exhibit normativity, because they are not determined by physical and chemical laws, but their close relationship with physical laws and physicalist ontology is transparent.

KEYWORDS:

• Biology
• biomedicine
• regulation
• information
• physicalism
• normativity

Acknowledgements

(ŠP) This paper is an output of the research project ThUMB (Theoretical Underpinnings of Molecular Biology), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, grant number HRZZ-IP-2018-01-3378. (ŠP) would also like to acknowledge the support from the University of Rijeka (project KUBIM: uniri-human-18-265). We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although we are generally sympathetic with the account proposed by Bich et al. (2016) and, respectively, by Mossio and Bich (2017), we are not convinced by its sharp distinction between control and regulatory mechanisms.

2 Regulation may also be playing the main role in generating evolutionary novelty, see Kirschner, Gerhart, and Norton (2005).

3 Clearly, there is a certain parallelism between the regulation and function debates. We may single out the following conceptual areas of contact: (i) there are regulation functions, e.g., that of the bacterial lac-operon, which is, at least gradually, distinct from the regulated subsystems. Here, for instance, the function of a transcription factor within the overall protein synthesis; (ii) in addition, according to a standard view, a mechanism ought to have a function (see, most recently, Garson forthcoming). Being a mechanism or, minimally, displaying some mechanistic features, biological regulation is, thus, a function bearer of a particular kind.

4 The shared application of the concept of regulation across the central nervous system and other biological systems opens up the possibility of more cross-talk between neuroscience and biomedicine—which has traditionally been confined to what is below (roughly) the neck. For an elaboration of this implication, see Bolton and Gillett (2019). Current research programs include for example understanding between links between the regulatory roles of hormones and neurotransmitters in the immune system and the brain (e.g. Wu et al. 2019; Pondeljak and Lugović-Mihić 2020).

5 Barbieri (2016) proposes a solution to the tension between physicalism and biological normative information, which distinguishes and then seeks to reconcile life ‘as chemistry’ and life ‘as chemistry + information’, specifically in the genetic code (1–2 et passim). Barbieri’s approach has much in common with what we are proposing here, but we differ somewhat by characterising the first construction of life in terms specifically of energy exchanges and transformations (not ‘as chemistry’), and the second in term of regulation not (primarily) information, and not limited to genetic coding. We suggest that this conceptualisation helps make sense of the relation between the two aspects of biological processes.

6 An excellent discussion of the concept of regulation in its ordinary, everyday sense, which is consistent with its use in biology, which are intending to reflect in this paper, can be found in Schroeder (2014).

7 Research into just this area is of course supercharged at present because of the Covid 19 pandemic, with various mechanisms and stages of the viral takeover being targeted in the development of different vaccines (see, e.g. Lurie et al. 2020; Grifoni et al. 2020).

8 For the account of a structural type of causation in molecular biology, namely, template-directed causation and how it relates to Crick’s characterisation of genetic information (Crick 1958, 153), see Šustar (2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Croatian Science Foundation [grant number HRZZ-IP-2018-01-3378]; University of Rijeka [grant number uniri-human-18-265].