| Modern biological science has been extraordinarily successful in figuring out how the natural world works. But that science has also been extraordinarily complicated, both as a social activity and in the workings of nature uncovered. The following eight essays embrace both the methodological and metaphysical tangles of contemporary biology, finding in them philosophical lessons about natural kinds, realism, explanation, reductionism, hypothesis/experiment relations, and other topics in the philosophy of science.;Although each chapter should be seen as a self-standing unit, there is an informal flow to the discussion that I will outline here. Part I, composed of chapter one through four, deals broadly with metaphysical issues relating to species and individual organisms. I begin in Bacteria, Sex and Systematics with a critique of evolutionary accounts of bacterial species. The heart of this critique is that we can't both hold that the tree of life reveals to us a unique natural systematics and at the same time reject all forms of essentialism. Following that, Organisms and their Parents , is an inquiry into what it is to be a parent and to be an organism. This account helps to deal with some unfinished business of the first essay. Next, in Species Ontology in Possible (and Actual) Worlds, I argue that it is harder than was once thought to maintain that all species are spatio-temporally connected, as typically required by arguments that species are individuals. Concluding the first part is Plato's Joints, an investigation into whether there are natural joints in the animal body. Although primarily an investigation in biological ontology, I end with some reflections on monism, pluralism and realism that are relevant to the discussions in the preceding chapters.;Part II, composed of chapters five through eight, deals with experimental and explanatory issues in non-evolutionary biology. In chapter five I turn to experimental method in contemporary biology, examining claims that experimental strategies have moved from a hypothesis directed form to an exploratory activity following access to new kinds of instrumentation. In chapter six, Rosenberg Redux, we'll see how biologists have constructed compelling explanations of development. In particular, I consider Alex Rosenberg's argument that biological development can best be explained at the molecular level, simply in terms of specific molecules and their interactions. Although I find that Rosenberg's argument isn't successful, I am left without an account of how development should be explained. Mechanisms Under the Microscope explores proposals that all satisfying biological explanations are descriptions of mechanisms that are in some sense non-reducible. Finding a disturbing lack of depth in accounts of mechanistic explanation, I conclude that this attempt to resist reductionism fails. However, taking my cue from the mechanists' emphasis on complex systems, I find in the eighth chapter, The Baby and the Bath Water, that some complex systems, in particular some Gene Regulatory Networks, can provide an objective higher level at which to couch explanations preferable to those rehearsing all the molecular details. In the process, I will propose an account of non-reductive explanation in biology that I hope to show is distinct from traditional accounts in terms of multiple-realizability. I conclude with an epilogue in which I position my past and future research projects within larger problems in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of science. |
