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Empiricism is not a philosophy that you must assume in order to pursue scientific research. It is a protocol you follow in order to collaborate with other scientists. Admittedly it has it's limitations, but any protocol does, and it seems to provide a framework that allows research data and theories to be engaged by the widest possible pool of participants.

Which is why the physical sciences produce theories that are capable of mathematical expression. Mathematics is the universal language. All the great scientific theories can be expressed in terms of mathematical notation.

Except Darwin's theory. It seems irreducible to mathematical formulae. In just this sense it appears "unscientific" in a key respect.

I don't agree with your suggestion that Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was primarily interested in extending the community of scientific discourse, to make the conduct of science a more "collaborative" and "inclusive" process.

Rather, I believe that he wanted to put "the final nail in the coffin" of scholasticism and Aristotelianism. He found both to be relentlessly deductive in their methods. What Bacon was looking for was an inductive method:

Now what the sciences most stand in need of is a form of induction which shall analyze experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion. — The Great Instauration

Good luck, Francis. (Bacon never heard of the observer problem — which didn't become topical before Einstein and Bohr, some four hundred years after his death.)

In Novum Organum, he tells us the following about "natural philosophy" — which is what "science" used to be called, right up through Darwin's time — and how he feels it should be conducted:

Aphorism XCV — Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment, or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use: the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course, it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy: for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it; but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made) much may be hoped.

Aphorism XCVI — We have as yet no natural philosophy that is pure; all is tainted and corrupted: in Aristotle's school by logic; in Plato's by natural theology; in the second school of Platonists, such as Proclus and others, by mathematics, which ought only to give definiteness to natural philosophy, not to generate or give it birth. From a natural philosophy pure and unmixed, better things are to be expected.

That was Bacon's mission: To found a natural philosophy "pure and unmixed," founded on induction.

The problem seems to be that modern science does believe that if you break things down to their parts — as Bacon recommends — and then study the parts, once you know everything about the parts, you then have complete knowledge of the whole. But if you do this sort of thing to a biological system, you kill the whole. It is then completely irrecoverable.

As the poet put it: We murder to dissect.

What modern physics and information science is discovering is that the whole is greater than the simple sum of its parts.

Just some stray thoughts today, dear tacticalogic. BTW, Bacon is a great read, whether or not one agrees with everything he says.

Thank you so much for writing!