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Philosophers of science have claimed that the position of biology among the sciences is the most prominent and controversial issue of the philosophy of biology. Some authors consider biology merely a "province" of physics and reducible to physics, others uphold the autonomy of biology, while still others have decided that biology lacks the rigor to justify being considered a genuine science. In my own analysis of this problem. I have concluded that the science of biology has all the attributes of a genuine science, as well as a number of other characteristics restricted to biology. These characteristics are listed and discussed. They justify ranking biology as an autonomous science, just as autonomous as physics and many other sciences.
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Ernst Mayr (1996) studied this question.
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