(2) Can Philosophy Help Biology, Or Philosophers Understand Bio

7/30/2019 (2) Can Philosophy Help Biology, Or Philosophers Understand Bio

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Essay Review

STEVEN ROSE

CAN PHILOSOPHY HELP BIOLOGY, OR PHILOSOPHERS

UNDERSTAND BIOLOGISTS?

Alexander Rosenberg, Darwinism in Philosophy, Social Science and

Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 257 pp., ISBN

0-521-66407-1.

Philosophy of science used to be a terrain colonized largely either byex-physicists or trained philosophers attracted to the seeming certain-

ties of physicist law-givers. Physics (and to a lesser extent, chemistry)

has all the features a philosopher could desire. Its generalisations are

universal, its regularities, dignified as laws, can be expressed with mathe-

matical certainty, and its structures of experimental verification are models

of clarity and precision. Even the theoretical debates within physics

have become the stuff of philosophical analysis. The only other domain

for philosophers appeared to be that provided by psychology, with its

historical roots and current connections to the theory of mind and

even consciousness. But as psychology merged into neuroscience in the

1960s, the space available for traditional philosophy seemed steadily to

reduce. Recently, this has been vigorously re-occupied by a new group

of neurophilosophers (typified perhaps by Patricia Churchland), who are

immensely attracted to the prospects of reducing both mind and brain to

computational algorithms.

How very different is the state of the biological sciences! Intensely

empirical, our experimental findings are contingent and apparently incapa-

ble of generalisation, with virtually nothing recognisable as a law in the

sense that physicists know. Furthermore, biology was and is divided into

numerous subsections, from animal behaviour and ecology to molecular

biology, with seemingly few points of contact between these distinct disci-

plines. A delight to some who relish the infinite variety of natural history

and the pleasures of pluralism, these messy discourses, with their rich-ness of data and inadequate standards of proof, have been a philosophers

nightmare.

Minerva 40: 181187, 2002.

2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


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182 STEVEN ROSE

This was so until the time when, perhaps a couple of decades ago,

the shades of Popper were cast off, and the one seemingly fundamental

biological law attracted the attention of philosophy. I am speaking, of

course, of evolution by natural selection, the Darwinian insight which,at the beginning of this new century, seems to have colonized virtually

all fields of intellectual inquiry.1 Darwinian evolution, dismissed half a

century ago by Popper as untestable and therefore unscientific, became by

the 1990s Daniel Dennetts universal acid, a fundamental law of nature

that eats through everything it touches, from physics to ethics and art

appreciation. Hence it has become the focus of work for a new generation

of philosophers of biology. Michael Ruse, the general editor of the series

of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology, is typical in this context,

and the series titles, ranging from Elliott Sobers From a Biological Point of

View, which appeared in 1994, to Alexander Rosenbergs new book, reflect

this focus. Indeed it would seem as if little else in biology interests such

biological philosophers, though few of Ruses authors write with Dennettsarrogant panache. How far such studies affect what we biologists actually

do is another question entirely. Although most biologists would recognize

the truth of Dobzhanskys famous dictum that nothing in biology makes

sense except in the light of evolution2 and this is the dictum so readily

seized upon by the new generation of philosophers of biology the hard

truth is that most biologists, molecular through to organismic, proceed in

practice with complete indifference to such evolutionary concerns. It isnt

even that we are speaking prose without knowing; it is that evolutionary

questions scarcely impinge upon our everyday work.

However, for Rosenberg, . . . the main principles of Darwins theory . . .

are the only trans-temporally exceptionless laws of biology (p. 70). Thegeneralisations in biology which have consistently led to the discovery

of new phenomena are those embodied in the theory of natural selection

itself . . . evolutionary theory . . . has led repeatedly to the discovery of

remarkable and unexpected phenomena. This should be no surprise since

the theory of natural selection embodies the only set of laws strict or

non-strict to be discovered in biology (p. 64). As Rosenberg fails to

identify any of these unexpected phenomena, I am left puzzling a little as

to what they might be. I assume that he is referring to selectionist accounts

1 See Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (eds.), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against

Evolutionary Psychology (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).2 I prefer nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of history, which

embraces evolution, development, life-history and for humans social, cultural and

technological history, too. See S. Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).


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CAN PHILOSOPHY HELP BIOLOGY? 183

of adaptations, the mathematization of evolutionary stable strategies, sex

ratios, and some of the sociobiological accounts of kin selection. Some of

these would warrant a Popperian humph, as mere just-so stories; others

are indeed genuinely common-sensically surprising until explained asselective mechanisms. But, in most respects, Darwinian natural selection

represents not so much a generator of unexpected findings as a marvel-

lously satisfying synthetic account of one of the principal mechanisms by

which life emerged from the primeval soup, and indeed how, in due course,

both philosophers and biologists appeared on earth.

Rosenbergs argument that proper laws must be trans-temporal is itself

problematic. On the one hand, even some physicists and cosmologists,

such as Lee Smolin attracted by Dennettian universal acids are

suggesting that the laws of physics themselves evolve.3 On the other

hand, Rosenberg ignores the attempts to create a non-historical, structural

biology, as in the work of Webster and Goodwin which would surely have

suited his argument better.4 Webster and Goodwin claim, for instance,following a pre-Darwinian French tradition, that once the trans-historical

laws of form have been identified, evolutionary studies will become mere

antiquarianism. Is this really what Rosenberg wants? There is a certain

irony in praising that supremely historical science of evolution as trans-

temporal. And for those of us who rejoice in biologys essential historicity,

this rejection of the very core of our subjects style would seem at best

quixotic.

Further, Rosenbergs exclusion of other law-like explanations of

biological phenomena is definitely too restrictive. As a biochemist, I would

point to the general principles of catalysis embodied in enzyme action,

and, as an unexpected and surprising phenomenon, the theory of allostericinteractions in enzymology neither of which can be derived from or

owe specific allegiance to natural selection theory, although this theory

can be invoked to explain how such mechanisms may have become better

perfected over evolutionary time.

This idealistic interpretation of what science is about is why philos-

ophers such as Rosenberg are still able to dismiss much of biology as

not properly scientific, a comment that reappears through several of the

essays in his new collection.5 Proper science must still conform to the

physics model and, as it would appear from the quotation above, and

3 Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997).4 Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Form and Transformation: Generative and

Relational Principles in Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).5 I should declare an interest at this point. Rosenberg and I had a series of fairly sharp

exchanges at a conference on reductionism in biology held in 2000 in Paris. The editor of

Minerva was warned of this when I was invited to contribute this review. Fortunately, the


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184 STEVEN ROSE

others similarly dispersed through the volume, only Darwinian evolution

can fit the bill. The eleven essays he reprints here, published originally at

various times from 1987 to 2000, all loosely fit his title, ranging as they

do from debates within philosophy proper such as that over naturalisticethics and eliminative materialism to reflections on the utility or other-

wise of evolutionary theory to economics, and the merits of the human

genome project. The result is somewhat lacking in coherence. Present day

philosophers, it seems to me, are rarely self-reflective. Rosenbergs views

for instance on holism versus reductionism shift significantly between

the reprinted essays, and it would have been interesting for the reader

to find him brooding on this, and his own intellectual trajectory, in his

introduction, which is otherwise rather impersonal.

Sociologists and historians of science, I find, seem to have little

problem in accepting that science is what scientists do. So the biolog-

ical sciences are indeed sciences; they are just different sorts of science

from physics, which is after all but one small branch of the body ofhuman knowledge about the world in which we live. Philosophers find

this harder, which is partly why they are troubled by the lack of significant

universal biological laws. Indeed, as Rosenberg points out himself, among

the few generalisations dignified by the name of law in biology, the best

known are Mendels Laws in genetics, which turn out to be so replete

with exceptions as to be no more than a very special case of the rules of

genetic inheritance, and which furthermore, as he points out, do not map

well onto current theories in molecular genetics. They thus do not meet

the requirement of that sought-for philosophers stone, of being formally

reducible.

A proper science, Rosenberg implies, should be able to explain, notmerely describe, the phenomena it studies. But he never reflects on what

he regards as a proper explanation, rather than a description. When a

physiologist refers to the cause of a muscle contraction as the firing of

the motor nerve to that muscle, is that an explanation or a description?

Following Tom Nagel,6 Rosenberg implies that this is merely a descrip-

tion; an explanation, although he never spells this out, would presumably

require reducing the phenomenon to some more general statement in

the molecular or atomic languages of physics and chemistry. Admittedly,

towards the close of one of the central essays in this volume, he reluctantly

concedes that such unreduced explanations may be the best we can do

differences between us at that meeting only peripherally impinge on the subject matters of

the essays under review here.6 See my discussion with Nagel in the Ciba Foundation symposium, The Limits of

Reductionism in Biology (London: Wiley, 1997).


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that the limitations of our evolved minds mean that biology can never

become a full science in the sense of physics, and we may have to put up

with explanations that are emotionally but not rigorously philosophically

satisfying.If this were to be the case, so much the worse for philosophy. After all,

neither explanations nor descriptions exist in some philosophical vacuum

outside human concerns; they are accounts of phenomena that humans

give for a purpose, and the purpose for which a physiologist may wish

to discuss muscle contraction may very well mean that talking about a

prior nerve impulse has greater explanatory power than a discussion of

ions moving across a cell membrane or the sliding of the actin and myosin

protein filaments which constitute the macromolecular constituents of the

muscle. Such a molecular account may indeed be a mere description,

missing some essential explanatory element of the phenomenon, such as

its function in the life of the organism, and therefore failing to provide

the explanation required by physiology. And just why a philosopher hasthe right to adjudicate that such a physiological account should fall so

far short of scientific adequacy (p. 71) tells us more about philosophical

arrogance than it does about how to do science. But to concede that either

explanations or descriptions are human tools moves closer than Rosenberg

is prepared to go to social constructionism, which for him is the ultimate

cop-out.

This tension is most apparent in the two most biologically central of the

essays. The first of these, Reductionism Redux, takes as its starting point

the claim, by the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert in his book The

Triumph of the Embryo, that ultimately the embryo may be computable

that is, predictable from a full knowledge of its DNA content. The second,What Happens to Genetics when Holism Runs Amok?, reflects on a prior

paper by Griffiths and Grey arguing for a developmental systems approach

to understanding life processes. Oddly, Rosenberg seems sympathetic to

both positions, as if in the three years between the two essays he has

sharply shifted his views. It is here that I would have preferred a little

debate between Rosenberg a and Rosenberg b, but his authoritative style

will not permit such mischievous reflections. As it happens, my own

prior review of Wolperts book specifically criticized his claim as to the

potential computability of the embryo, as ignoring the shaping power of

both temporal and spatial constraints. Rosenberg sees this as a claim to

downward causation, a pernicious idea due, I believe, originally to Roger

Sperry. But for those who like myself embrace an autopoietic viewpointon development the term originally provided by Humberto Maturana and

Francisco Varela downward causation is as absurd a concept as upward


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186 STEVEN ROSE

causation, confusing as it does the question of levels of organisation in

biological systems and oddly for a philosopher failing to distinguish

between even the various uses of the word cause which date back to

Aristotle. Insofar as Rosenberg (at least in his b version) sympathizes withthe developmental systems perspective offered by Griffiths and Grey, and

distances himself from Wolpertian triumphalism, I am happy indeed to

go along with him. As he points out, because adaptive strategies interact,

timeless truths in terrestrial biology [are] impossible to come by (p. 114),

and biologys regularities and models . . . will never give rise to anything

recognizably nomological by the lights of physical science, but . . . are

indispensible for all that (pp. 115116). Cheers!

The essays that follow reflect critically on the increasing tendency to

seek evolutionary justifications for moral ethical and social dilemmas. Is

an evolutionary code of ethics based on a better understanding of human

nature as E.O. Wilson, and following him new generations of evolu-

tionary psychologists argue possible or desirable? Rosenberg is rightlydubious, although it is a pity that this essay, dating from 1990, could not

have been updated to take into account more current claims, such as those

of Geoffrey Miller.7 Something of the same problem afflicts the otherwise

welcome critique of evolutionary economics that follows. By focusing his

critique on the work of Alchian dating from 1950, he misses the dubious

flowering of this new mix of metaphor and misunderstanding that the

evolutionary economics of the 1990s have generated. Nonetheless, the crit-

ical analysis of what might be the best case scenarios for such evolutionary

claims is welcome, although more robustly dealt with in a recent book

edited by Hardcastle.8 Rosenbergs collection ends with a rather weak

and dated essay on the Human Genome Project, which concludes withthe view that it should never have been state financed, but left to private

venture capital and market forces which in practice would probably have

meant Craig Venter owning patents on the entire genome (and as a result,

perhaps, no one being able to propagate their own genes except under a

Venter licence).

The remaining essays in the book deal with primarily philosophical

issues, including a major analysis of naturalist epistemology, following

Quine. As a non-philosopher I found these informative, if not exactly

easy reading, but it would be even more presumptious of me than usual

to venture too far into what is, after all, the philosophers rather than the

7 Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of

Human Nature (Oxford: Heinemann, 2000).8 Valerie Gray Hardcastle (ed.), Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical

Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).


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biologists terrain. But my impression remains, now having read several

books in the Cambridge series, that the venture of bringing philosophy to

bear on biology is too important to ignore. And I dont mean just for philos-

ophers. A science which is ignorant of its own history and indifferent to itsown epistemology is fatally flawed, and this is the condition in which most

biological research is conducted. However, it cannot be done in the rather

abstract way that Rosenbergs or even Sobers approach implies. One of

the attractive features of the new work coming from the neurophilosophers,

like Patricia Churchland, for instance is that its authors have actually

gone to the extent of immersing themselves in the day-to-day working lives

of neurophysiological and behavioural laboratories. Perhaps an exchange

programme that brought philosophers into ecology and molecular biology

labs is what is now needed, if we are to move forward.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Rose is Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour

Research Group at the Open University, and joint Professor of Physic at Londons

Gresham College. A neuroscientist by profession, his recent books include Life-

lines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) and,

jointly edited with the sociologist Hilary Rose, Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments

against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

The Open University

Milton Keynes MK7 6 AA

UK

E-mail: [email protected]


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(2) Can Philosophy Help Biology, Or Philosophers Understand Bio