Peter Godfrey-Smith's Philosophy of Biology (Princeton University Press), may not sound like the kind of book even science enthusiasts want to crack open for pleasure, but it's a great way to get up to speed on all the issues that working biologists love to debate amongst themselves.
Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the Philosophy Program at City University of New York. His more academic books include, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press), and Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press). His main areas of interest include the philosophy of mind and pragmatism.
In just 200 pages, Philosophy of Biology includes short, succinct chapters on mechanisms and models, natural selection, genes, adaptation and function, species and the Tree of Life, evolution and social behavior, and information.
But as I mentioned in my last post, the question for many science geeks is: why even bother with a book on philosophy at all--let alone the philosophy of science?
What good is it?
So, I asked Scott Carson, an associate professor of philosophy at Ohio University*, what he tells his students at the start of each semester.
Carson's main areas of interest are the history of evolutionary biology and the biomedical sciences, and among his publications is this fascinating essay he co-authored on how quantum indeterminacy may effect evolution.
"Typically," he said via email, "I tell my students that philosophy of science is important because we live in a society that is very much a product of what Bas Van Fraassen called 'The Scientific Image'. That is, we are, as persons, largely shaped by the culture that surrounds us and we are presently surrounded by a culture that is increasingly impacted by science and technology.
"If we are to be intelligent and well-informed members of the society and culture in which we find ourselves, it is essential that we understand not only the results of scientific research, but the foundations of science itself."
In Carson's view, this will put us in a better position to evaluate questions about the nature of the authority of the sciences and the reliability of the conclusions and recommendations made by scientists.
"Ideally a philosopher of science is not someone who hopes to make any positive contributions to the working sciences," he said, "but someone who is interested in answering philosophical questions that are informed by the discoveries of the sciences and who wants to describe and assess scientific practice as accurately as possible."
In terms of the current book, he added, "I think you will find that this is very close to what Godfrey-Smith believes is the proper function of the philosopher of science."
"If philosophers of science do a good job of understanding and teaching the foundations of the sciences to their students," said Carson, "then there is some hope that we will gradually develop a better-informed public with respect to the STEM disciplines. That hope might be somewhat slim, of course, since not everyone goes to college and not everyone who goes to college takes philosophy and not everyone who takes philosophy takes philosophy of science—but it is better than nothing."
This indeed is echoed in Godfrey-Smith's book, which in nine chapters covers all of the big questions that biologists argue about.
For example: in evolution, the question of how to define species remains a topic of considerable debate.
This is something John Wilkins addressed in the videos I linked to before. As odd as it sounds, biologists have different definitions of the term for working purposes. But as Godfrey-Smith points out, the history of the species concept is complicated.
Thinking about species was transformed by Darwin and evolutionary theory. The story is sometimes told as one in which everyone before Darwin was in the thrall of a typological view, which Darwin exploded. The real history is more complicated (Winsor 2006), but Darwin certainly changed the landscape. From then onward species had to be regarded as things that can evolve slowly from other species and have vague boundaries. On a Darwinian view, variation within a species does not reflect imperfection or faulty realization of a type, but is the normal state of affairs— I will say more about this attitude to variation at the end of the next chapter. It is possible to shoehorn evolutionary thinking into a typological view, but since Darwin, there has been a search for a treatment of species that fits better with an evolutionary perspective. At least two dozen different “species concepts” have been proposed, though they fall (appropriately) into a smaller number of clusters. [from Chapter Seven]
Then there is the whole question of 'information'. Creationists have been arguing for years that the genetic code is a program of information that can only be properly understood as the work of an intelligent agent. But it's a faulty metaphor, according to Godfrey-Smith.
He discusses information theory and how it applies--and doesn't apply--to biology in his last chapter.
Another motivation for the view that evolution is an informational process comes from the idea that an evolving population accumulates information about its environment. For [Richard] Dawkins, a species is a computer that “builds up, over the generations, a statistical description of the worlds in which the ancestors of today’s species members lived and reproduced” (1998, p. 239). It is true that evolution is a process in which earlier events leave marks and traces that are present later. That itself is nothing unusual in a physical process. A geological formation, such as a mountain, contains traces of the processes that produced it, in its rock strata and other features (including its fossils). Changes in gene pools have causes, and sometimes it is possible to work out, within limits, how a species reached its present state. The sequence of branching events in the tree of life leaves marks from which the history can be reconstructed. When the past leaves traces in the present in this way, these traces in a sense are “signs,” but only in the way seen also in ordinary tree rings, which can be used to infer the history of a tree but have no further role. So far there is no reason to think that evolution has a relationship to information that other physical processes do not have.
While Philosophy of Biology is intended mostly for students, non-specialists should not be put off. Godfrey-Smith's style is engaging, almost conversational.
Available in hardcover and Kindle formats.
* the post originally stated that Scott Carson was an associate professor at Ohio State University. This has been corrected.
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