When you picture different levels of organisation in the biological world, what is it that springs to mind? For a lot of us it is a picture that probably expands from bottom upwards, something like: molecules –>cells –>tissues –>organs –>organ systems –>organisms. Most of us will have encountered this way of thinking about biological levels first in some introductory biology textbook somewhere along the way. This is related to what is sometimes called the “layer cake” model of biological organisation: all of biology is seen as layered into such levels, different theories that apply at each level, and there is some way of translating between them that shows how the upper levels reduce to lower ones.

However, this way of thinking about levels in biology actually comes with a lot of problems, and has been widely criticised. How, then, to best think about different “levels” in biology? What do scientists mean when they use language like this, and what role do such concepts play in shaping the process of biological science? This episode, we were joined by philosopher Dr Daniel Brooks from the University of Cincinnati, to tell us more about the significance of “levels” concepts in biology.

You can read more on this topic by Dr Daniel Brooks and Dr Markus Eronen at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page, Levels of Biological Organisation. Give their recent paper The significance of levels of organization for scientific research: A heuristic approach a read and follow Dr Brooks’ research here.