Leveling biological Systems: Material organization and scaffolding scientific Advance

While general calls for more theory in biology are on the rise, less attention has been paid to the practical usefulness of theorizing about biological phenomena. Furthermore, the increased interdisciplinarity needed to address complex biological problems introduces challenges into how we think about knowledge advancement. All too often, consensus for how to bring the resources of different disciplines together into ordered and coherent frameworks can remain elusive. Here, we address these issues as it especially concerns how we should think about the future of the life sciences. We turn to biological neuroscience as a case study, where recent and profound technological changes in this field bring these questions acutely into relief. We argue that conceptual reasoning, the scrutiny of concepts and their roles in structuring scientific endeavors, can enrich biological practice and help understand how new, locally stable knowledge is generated. The centerpiece of this discussion features a renewed look at the concept of levels of organization, a familiar concept in biology that is often assumed, but rarely developed in detail. We describe the roles of this concept in structuring practical scientific reasoning and as a source of 'stable variation' in characterizing and manipulating biological phenomena. Second, we propose supplementing our understanding of knowledge advancement by considering how we scaffold new achievements and insight from the present into the future. We suggest that the features of the levels concept allow accommodating variability and continuity across experimental reasoning in biology, serving as a scaffolding device for fields such as biological neuroscience.