I think that chemistry, physics, and mathematics, are engaged in a program of understanding their subject in terms of the sort of first principles that Descartes was after. Reduction of the subject to a set of simpler thoughts that are outside of it.
Biologists stand out because they have already given up on that idea. They may still seek to simplify complex things by refining principles of some kind, but it's a "whatever stories work best" approach. More Feyerabend, less Popper. Instead of axioms they have these patterns that one notices after failing to find axioms for a while.
Several different definitions are being bandied about. If you think of reduction as understanding a material system in terms of its components, biology is now reductionist, having abandoned vitalism.
Evolution is a theory of the origin of species via natural selection of heritable traits; evolution is not a theory of biogenesis, the origin of life itself.
Yeah, I almost wrote ‘nearly have a theory of everything’ for that reason, but decided it wasn’t worth the extra words. We have a few plausible outlines of how life started, and IMO it doesn’t really matter all that much which one(s) actually happened. When we ourselves are doing biogenesis, there’s no requirement that it has to happen the way it happened before. It would be interesting to know, though, so if in your estimation we don’t have a theory of everything because of that, I’m okay with that.
That's a fine counterexample to "theory of everything", and fertile ground for spirited debate. But I think it's a distinction thats relevant to <1% of the work that biologists do, so like... does it matter?
Biologists stand out because they have already given up on that idea. They may still seek to simplify complex things by refining principles of some kind, but it's a "whatever stories work best" approach. More Feyerabend, less Popper. Instead of axioms they have these patterns that one notices after failing to find axioms for a while.