4. Who Can Do Philosophy of Biology?
As David Hull observed in 2002, philosophers “are attempting to join with biologists to improve our understanding of…biological phenomena”
(p. 124). As we have seen (2.d), a demarcation between the two profiles—
the philosopher and the biologist—is possible but labile, and the distinction is perfectly compatible with any one scholar doing both, even simultaneously (cf. Pradeu 2009). Consider now how Hull’s quote goes on: “But sometimes the tables are turned. Biologists take up traditional philosophical topics and attempt to treat them even if they are not professional philosophers” (Ibidem). Biologists can turn to philosophy in two different ways: by reflecting philosophically on their own work or by naturalizing philosophical problems. In the first case, biologists get interested in issues of epistemology or methodology, and, from the ground of their work, they extrapolate ways of thinking or modes of inference. Naturalization happens when science becomes capable to say something significant and constraining about a traditional topic of philosophy, exemplified here by the origin of morality.
a. Philosophical Biologists
It is not infrequent that biologists undertake philosophical reflections on their own work. This is eased by the fact that some tasks of philosophy, such as conceptual analysis or linguistic clarification, are integral parts of scientific work (see also 2.d). Indeed, one might say that biologists, being experts about their own theories, are sometimes more qualified than philosophers to reflect on their own work. But what about the tendency to generality that characterizes philosophy of biology (section2)? Well, the generalizing route, too, can be followed by working scientists. A biologist’s philosophical effort may certainly vary in depth, richness, reach, and influence, depending on many factors such as the range of his or her interests in terms of both philosophical background and aims. With a good philosophical background, a biologist can match more effectively with debates in philosophical areas. Their aims may go beyond strict functionality for their own research and reach a genuine desire for capturing, defending, or criticizing something deep about their own science. Two examples—among many others—of very influential, philosophically-oriented biologists are ornithologist Ernst Mayr and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
i. Mayr and Population Thinking
Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) was one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the20th century, but he also increasingly worked in the history and philosophy of biology. He was “a crucial link between professional philosophers of science and professional biologists” (O’Malley 2010b:
530-1). Some of his areas of reflection were the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes, the nature of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and the centrality of speciation and species defined by his Biological Species Concept (see 3.a). This article will focus on Mayr’s idea of population thinking as an example of how “one scientist uses
‘scientific concepts’ to forge a conceptual tool with a wider range of historical and philosophical applicability” (Chung 2003: 278).
The population notion was already central in Mayr’s work in 1942. His main concern was the methodology of systematics. Mayr had promoted a new systematics, looking for variation in large samples as opposed to few type specimens, and considering geography, genetics, and other sources as opposed to morphology only. As Carl Chung reconstructs, Mayr was first to formulate the distinction between typological and population thinking in 1955. A few years later, Mayr (1959) started pushing population thinking as the major innovation introduced by Charles Darwin and developed by biology as a natural historical science, different and autonomous from other sciences. According to population thinking, “no two individuals or biological events are exactly the same and processes in biology can be understood only by a study of variation”
(Mayr 1955, cit. in Chung 2003: 288). In opposition, Mayr described typological thinking as having its deep roots in the Western cultural tradition, particularly in Platonic philosophy: “Implicit in this concept is that variation as such is unimportant since it represents only the
‘shadows’ of the eidos” (Mayr 1955: 485), the essences or ideas that lie behind diversity. As Chung points out, the main battlefield for this opposition was the concept of species. For Mayr, the incarnation of typological thinking in biology is the morphological species concept, according to which individuals belong to the same species by virtue of
sharing their morphological characteristics. By
contrast, biological species concepts are population concepts. The latter take into account variation, and in particular either reproductive barriers (two populations are different species if they coexist with no fertile mating) and/or geographical variation with reproductive flow between populations.
What is interesting here is the philosophical reach of Mayr’s ideas: he consciously worked them up from his systematics field work, used them for a philosophical interpretation of biology, and tied them to broader philosophical themes. In Chung’s words, the enterprise was “an attempt to liberate certain key ideas of the ‘students of diversity’ from their disciplinary constraints, and to render them more generally applicable by repackaging them into a broader historical and philosophical distinction that pertains to all of biology” (Chung 2003: 294-5). For sure, one goal was
to legitimize the natural historical sciences, including systematics, taxonomy, and evolutionary biology, against the criticisms of ‘the new biology’—molecular, reductionistic, and drawing explicit inspiration from the physical sciences…philosophically he could argue for the ‘in principle’ need for an evolutionary (population thinking) approach in order to offer adequate and complete explanations of biological phenomena. (Chung: 295)
Population thinking, once devised, shaped Mayr’s own interpretations of the history of biology, and provided him solutions to philosophical
problems such as the method and the autonomy of biology. It was generally taken up by philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists such as Michael T. Ghiselin—notice the philosophical title of his 1997 book Metaphysics and the Origin of Species. There would be many other examples from Mayr’s work in which he developed philosophical ideas out of science with precise polemic aims and great influence on all scholars of biology. Statements like the distinction between ultimate and proximate causes became common currency for scientists. This does not mean that Mayr’s ideas weren’t criticized, as they increasingly are (Ariew 2003, Laland et al. 2011, 2013).
ii. Gould and Adaptationism
Scientists may end up doing philosophy if they get interested in the inferential structure of their own field. Inference, that is reasoning and its rules,is a classic topic in philosophy of science. Induction, deduction, and inference to the best explanation (IBE) are basic, well known types of inference, but, in scientific practice, they multiply and get combined and put to work in different ways, producing interesting conceptual and philosophical problems. Stephen Jay Gould (1942-2002) was a prolific writer (see more in section 5.d). Among his many favorite targets were a few inferential patterns employed by evolutionary biologists. The adaptationist inference was definitely one of the main ones since the famous Spandrels paper with Richard Lewontin (1979).
Other biologists, like G.C. Williams (1966), had advanced proposals for revising adaptationist inferences on different grounds. Gould’s campaign can be seen as an expression of him being a paleontologist with great interest in inferential patterns and with a view of evolution directly inspired to Darwin’s works.
Adaptationism consists in explaining biological phenomena by claiming that they are adaptations. In the Spandrels paper, Gould and Lewontin used the metaphor of the San Marco cathedral in Venice to argue that even structures that exploit fundamental functions can nonetheless result, originally, as structural byproducts of a whole architecture. They wanted to criticize their colleagues’ habit to tolerate lazy tests of adaptive hypotheses that “consisted in little more than a decent qualitative fit between observed behaviour or form, and a set of posited adaptive pressures and constraints” (Lewens 2008: 180). As Gould elaborated after the Spandrels paper, between structures and functions there is no one-to-one strict correspondence, but rather, redundancy.
Functions are distributed over several parts of organisms, and conversely any part we may call a trait or structure is involved in several mechanisms, functions, and processes in the organism’s life. In the appreciation of trade-offs between structural internal constraints and selected functions, Gould saw a revival of Charles Darwin’s original attention to “contrivances” (1877). Adaptive explanations will rarely suffice. In any case, they will need to be made testable and tested (Pievani and Serrelli 2011). Since 1982, together with Elisabeth Vrba, Gould proposed and promoted the neologism “exaptation” to address what he saw as two evolutionary mechanisms, distinct from adaptation, involving nonetheless natural selection and primary functions: functional
shift of a structure with previously different purposes, a process already identified by Darwin; and functional cooptation of a trait whose origin is non-adaptive— for example, a side effect due to a developmental constraint or a random insertion.
Gould’s ideas about adaptationism and other aspects of biological inference triggered cascades of philosophical reflections, for example on the multiplicity of meanings of adaptation: by adaptation we may mean either something ensuring or increasing fitness or something that seems designed for the performance in a particular environment, in a range of environments, or for a particular function. We may intend something which is being positively selected, or something whose existence is due to natural selection in the past (Godfrey-Smith 2001, Lewens 2008).
Biologists with philosophers, or philosophically-minded biologists, reflected on adaptationism often reacting, in one sense or the other, to Gould’s school of thought. Some scholars elaborated on the dubious ontology and instrumental nature of adaptations, while many others interpreted the challenge as the necessity of making adaptationist hypotheses testable (Pievani and Serrelli, cit.). Recently, plant biologist Mark E. Olson (2012) acknowledged the relevance of the “post-Spandrels consensus” on the importance of constraints in evolution among biologists. But he also pointed out post-Spandrels proliferation of contradictory “selection vs. constraints” and “externalist vs. internalist”
explanations for the same data. These contradictions were due, for Olson, to Gould’s vagueness in defining “constraint,” as well as to the lack of experimental techniques for exploring the accessibility of unobserved forms. But today’s embryological, manipulative, and comparative empirical strategies allow for experimental exploration of morphologies that are not observed in nature. By combining these techniques, biologists can turn “internalism” and “externalism” from a-priori positions into case-by-case, testable hypotheses. Also, selection and constraint are more properly seen as complementary and not in mutual contrast as, for Olson, the Spandrels paper tended to suggest. For Olson, thus, a developmental “renaissance of adaptationism” is under way.
As customary, philosophical issues raised by biologists have been taken up and elaborated further by philosophers. Commenting on the philosophical literature on adaptationism, Godfrey-Smith (2001) distinguished three different issues on which adaptationist, anti- adaptationist and moderate positions can be taken up.
The empirical issue is whether or not natural selection is a powerful and ubiquitous force in the natural world, with few constraints coming from biological variation, and with no comparable, competing causal factor.
The explanatory issue is whether the most important questions in biology are about the fitting of organisms and environments, given that natural selection is the only answer to such big problems (other processes and explanations are good for less important questions).
The methodological issue is whether or not starting with adaptive hypotheses—and holding to them—is good scientific practice. In 2009, a special issue of Biology & Philosophy was published as both a celebration
and a critical appraisal of the influence of the Spandrels paper. Therein, Lewens (2008) elaborated on Godfrey-Smith’s taxonomy, recognizing seven types of adaptationism, and arguing for the importance of asking a prerequisite question: “what is a trait?”.
b. Philosophical Issues Naturalized
The relevance and implications of biology for humanity became a thought-provoking and heartfelt issue as soon as intellectuals and laypeople reacted to Darwin’s works (1859, 1871). More than a century later, E.O. Wilson (1975) proposed a “new synthesis” as a project of explaining the most diverse human behavioral and psychological traits by means of evolutionary hypotheses. Wilson’s proposal led to sociobiology and more recently to evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al. 1992).
Human behavior, mind, morality, and systems of beliefs constitute the most interesting targets of possible, and controversial, naturalization.
Naturalization is what happens when matters that are traditionally philosophical become empirically accessible by some scientific approach or method. David Hull wrote provocatively that “Philosophy lost physics, then biology, then psychology. Geometry, logic and mathematics became separate disciplines with no necessary ties to philosophy,” therefore
philosophers hold very tenaciously to
“epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics” (Hull 2002: 124), because many of their other objects have been taken by science. But Hull also optimistically observed that one of the strengths of philosophy of biology “is that philosophers and biologists have ignored this distinction, working with each other on both sides of the divide” (Ivi: 117). In fact, naturalization is critically analyzed by philosophy, and there are many different philosophical positions on naturalism. So, naturalization is a fruitful object of study for philosophy of biology rather than a topic thief, and philosophy has a warranted place that is not going to evaporate by naturalization.
Philosophers’ reactions to Wilson’s “new synthesis” were, for Hull, a virtuous example of interactivity. After an initial wholesale opposition, many of them validated the challenge of naturalizing humans. Our species has to be seen as a proper part of the biological world, not as separated by any ontological divide. At the same time, philosophers highlighted inferential errors in biological explanations of human behaviors, epistemological limits in reconstructing the past, and ethical risks. They pursued theoretical refinements of the project, by improving multi-level selection models, for example. Many criticized the logical- deductive architecture of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, frequently built on ad hoc hypotheses and adaptationist just-so stories.
The debate is ongoing, and many arguments have been developed. For example, if many human psychological mechanisms are evolutionary novelties due to the interaction of ancestral genes and new environments, then many of these mechanisms are not adaptations and adaptive thinking in evolutionary psychology will fail to identify or explain them. More cautious, problematized, and integrated endeavors of biological explanation applied to humans are emerging, also under the stimulation of philosophy of biology (Sterelny 2003).
i. An Example: The Biology of Morality
It was for explaining human morality that Darwin hinted at ‘group selection’ (see 3.b), and the endeavor wasn’t finished with him. Evolutionary ethics, the association of morality with natural selection and evolution, provides good ground to Rosenberg and McShea’s remark that biology “…is the only scientific discipline that anyone has ever supposed might be able to answer the questions of moral and political philosophy” (2008: 3). Fast growing fields like neurobiology or cognitive neurosciences seem to be making biology more and more capable of addressing topics such as the origins of morality.
Philosopher Patricia Churchland (2011), for example, studied the scientific literature and hypothesized a particular pattern of neural activation that would constitute a “neurobiological platform” for morality.
Churchland highlighted the role played in this platform by molecules such as oxytocin, an ancient and simple peptide, found in all vertebrates.
In mammals, oxytocin “is at the hub of the intricate network of mammalian adaptations for caring for others” (Churchland 2011: 14). In fact, morality would share its neurobiological platform with other familiar phenomena of human life—attachment and bonding. More generally, “the palette of neurochemicals affecting neurons and muscles is substantially the same across vertebrates and invertebrates” (Churchland 2011: 45).
Among mammals, then, there is a wide “range of social patterns…, but underlying them are probably different arrangements of receptors for oxytocin and other hormones and neurochemicals” (p. 32). The striking thing is, for Churchland, that modest modifications in existing neural structures can lead to new outcomes. Morality and other phenomena would result from a not-so-exceptional modification of a pre-existing platform involved in mammalian parental cares. Churchland’s picture of evolution is again a familiar Gouldian one (4.a.ii):
Biological evolution does not achieve adaptations by designing a whole new mechanism from scratch, but modifies what is already in place, little bit by little bit. Social emotions, values, and behavior are not the result of a wholly new engineering plan, but rather an adaptation of existing arrangements and mechanisms that are intimately linked with the self- preserving circuitry for fighting, freezing, and flight, on the one hand, and for rest and digest, on the other. (Churchland 2011: 46)
Does the evolutionary continuity from mammalian parental care to morality constrain ethics and traditional philosophical theories of morality? Churchland’s view, while being only an example, is interesting in its intermediate position between strict biological determinism and cultural determinism. While biology can provide information and explanation on the platform for morality, the complexity of cultures provides scaffolding for moral development and definition so that moral decision remains a practical, dialogic, and social problem. However, the more general question is whether and how should moral philosophy—a large and highly technical field—take into any account what the sciences are discovering. The answers to this question are expected to come from philosophical studies of naturalization (Dupré 2001, De Caro and
Macarthur 2004). In any case, most philosophers of biology recognize a naturalistic fallacy in the idea that knowing more about the natural world would suffice for making moral, political, and social decisions.
ii. Philosophy Versus Naturalization?
To some philosophers, the naturalization of philosophical problems is rather uncontroversial, to the point that “the difference between philosophy and theoretical science is not a matter of kind but of degree,”
and the domain of philosophy is partly “the sum of all the questions to which science cannot (yet) answer” (Rosenberg and McShea 2008: 5).
For many others, defining philosophy as some kind of underdeveloped science is an expression of scientism and a category mistake regarding fields of knowledge. Many philosophers point out that the biological explanation of social actions, behaviors, and culture, may imply a Darwinian dimension without boiling down to it. Naturalism is related to,
but different from, other very general issues,
like determinism or reductionism. Some philosophers draw a distinction between a strong “scientistic” naturalism and a pluralistic, or
“liberalized,” naturalism (De Caro and Macarthur 2004). Scientistic naturalism considers philosophy as a branch of the natural sciences.
Liberalized naturalism includes different epistemic levels of analysis of human nature—from natural sciences to humanities—that share the exclusion of non-natural causes or principles.
Emphasizing the impact of biology on human capacities, social institutions, and ethical values is also a way to justify philosophy of biology as useful or even indispensable to philosophy and, more generally, to the humanities. Some presentations of philosophy of biology tend to justify the field by its particularity of “concerning human affairs”
(Rosenberg and McShea 2008: 8) and its being ultimately oriented to them. Some authors (Pradeu 2009) dislike this anthropocentric strategy in philosophy of biology and think the field could be otherwise justified.
Under these overarching debates, human organisms and the human species are understandably a hotspot of problems for philosophy of biology, and biologists and philosophers must confront the growing biological knowledge of humans.
The neurobiology of morality (4.b.i) is not automatically a subtraction of morality as a philosophical problem. Indeed, many reflections from a scientifically-informed philosophy are of primary importance to maintain vigilance and scrutiny: what are the aims and uses of these biological studies of humans? Could they be used, for example, for a classification of people with consequences on the distribution of rights? Would this be justified? Would the consequent choices and decisions be acceptable?
How are scientific results co-opted in clinical practice and health care?
How are communication issues with patients handled? How influential are social and cultural biases in the construction of the object of research? Is this acceptable and justifiable? What ideas of morality underlie the studies? Scientists working in these difficult grounds will constantly exercise philosophical thought (see also 5.b). For them, the rich tradition of moral philosophy might constitute a precious aid.
Meanwhile, philosophy of biology can inform philosophy about new and obsolete approaches in the scientific explanation of morality.
Evolutionary ethics is not necessarily tied to adaptationism (4.a.ii) or genetic determinism. The evolution of morality seems to resemble more bricolage than engineering. Against stereotypical and simplified views of evolution, morality cannot be identified with a set of genes, even though genes do not necessarily lose their importance, and the question about heritable patterns remains crucial in order to define what morality is in evolution.
Philosophy of biology can fight easy deterministic conclusions or identifications between naturalism and determinism while promoting useful definitions of the concepts involved: what is to be intended for morality in different contexts, and why finding an underlying arrangement of receptors is not going to replace the need for ethical reasoning and moral philosophy. Science is a form of knowledge and therefore subject to epistemology, conceptual analysis and change, and ethical reasoning. On the other hand, biology constantly brings new fuel to philosophical inquiry, even, perhaps especially, when philosophical issues get naturalized.
5. Philosophy Bringing the Life Sciences out of Their Research Context
There are multiple senses in which philosophy of biology brings the life sciences out of their research contexts. First, philosophy of biology can study and sometimes aid interactions among the life sciences or between them and other sciences. Second, sometimes philosophy is seen as capable of developing messages, ways of thinking, and their consequences and implications to elaborate a “philosophy of nature” and an overall vision of the living world (Godfrey-Smith 2009, p. 15). Third, philosophy can reflect on the roles and meanings of science and on the interactions between science and society with an approach different from that of the social sciences. In this way, it can assume critical points of view towards biology and reflect on how scientific claims are, could be, and should be received and elaborated by the public.
a. Philosophy of Biology at Intersections
What happens when different scientific fields or points of view come into intimate contact? Philosophy of biology has always been happily and effectively involved in this matter. A classic example (seen above, 3.a) is the analysis of coexistence, interaction, and implicit reciprocal dependencies between “the morphological, the physiological, and the genetical” viewpoints in taxonomy (Hull 1969: 176-7). Philosophers of biology often notice attractions and tensions and call for integrations.
They attend to emergent relationships among life sciences, as in the topical cases of micro- and macroevolution (Serrelli and Gontier 2015b) and evo-devo (see below), or between biology and other sciences, as in cultural evolution studies. Classic debates in philosophy of science, for
example on reductionism, provide conceptual coordinates for thinking about these connections.
A major development in biology began in the 1980s, when technical and theoretical advancements enabled the molecular study of development, opening the possibility of relating development to evolution in different ways (Gilbert et al. 1996, Minelli 2010, Olson 2012). Evo-devo, evolutionary developmental biology, was born. The contact was all the more significant because embryology, a discipline with an ancient tradition, had long been seen as far removed from evolutionary biology.
Many evo-devo protagonists and observers framed evo-devo within the insufficiency of the mathematical study of the intergenerational transmission of genes. This hegemonic field, population genetics, considered development as a “black box” and assumed a linear relation between genotype and phenotype (Laubichler 2010). In doing so, it would be blind to fundamental kinds of evolutionary innovation, incapable of addressing macroevolutionary change (Minelli 2010), and, more deeply, non-mechanistic, based on “conceptual abstractions” (Laubichler, cit.).
Yet, many scholars are pursuing a pluralistic integration. They point out that
To deny the internal consistency and the explanatory power of [the research program developed from population genetics] would be obviously foolish…. The objection is that there can (and should) be more to evolutionary biology than a research program restricted to the concepts and tools of population genetics (Minelli, cit.: 216).
Some scientists and philosophers focus on a broader polemic target: the Modern Synthesis, that is the foundation of evolutionary biology as it is practiced today, which happened between the 1910s and 1940s and was further canonized mainly by Ernst Mayr in the subsequent decades.
Critics analyze how the Modern Synthesis excluded lines of research as non-legitimate or irrelevant to evolution, while successfully pulling together Darwin’s natural selection, Mendel’s theory of inheritance, mathematical models of population genetics, and the work of the most disparate fields in biology (Gilbert et al. 1996, Serrelli 2015). Some philosophers and scientists are therefore proposing the idea of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (Pigliucci and Müller 2010). These movements are very interesting to philosophers of biology. They provide new access to traditional philosophical issues about scientific change, including the unity and disunity of science (Fodor 1974, Callebaut 2010).
They also invoke a necessary collaboration between history and philosophy of science, as shown by works that revised the received views on the nature of the divorce of embryology and evolution in the 1930s (Love 2003, Griesemer 2007 cf. section 7).
Philosophy of biology’s remarkable interest in cultural evolution studies is an example involving relationships between biology and other fields. The idea of similarities across biological and cultural evolution was already suggested by Darwin and his contemporaries, and several approaches were formalized in the second half of the 20th century (Cavalli Sforza
and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson 1985). Cultural change and stability are understood in terms of variation, selection, and inheritance/transmission of cultural traits, only requiring some correlation in cultural transmission from cultural parents (models from whom a cultural trait is acquired) to offspring (individuals acquiring the cultural trait). These evolution-inspired approaches to culture allow for a variety of unique mechanisms for cultural transmission, and incorporate processes like drift and multi-level selection. Capitalizing on such approaches, some social scientists are proposing that methods, findings, and theories be systematically exchanged between the biological and cultural sciences, particularly between disciplines that lie at the same level on a micro-to-macro scale (Mesoudi et al. 2006). This trans- disciplinarity is sometimes presented as the beginning of a late and needed evolutionary synthesis in the social sciences, similar to the Modern Synthesis in biology, but some philosophers think this is an overstatement while others think the claim is based on a naïve epistemological conception (Serrelli 2016a).
Similar proposals call philosophers of biology into question. The abstract formulations and philosophical issues of natural selection, multi-level selection, and drift (3.b) can help to evaluate the appropriateness of transfers of methods and theories (Godfrey-Smith 2009). General topics like population thinking (4.a.i) and adaptationism (4.a.ii), or reductionism will emerge in cultural evolution too. Progressionism is another very basic issue here. The misleading idea of progress was in fact roughly applied in anthropology by evolutionists in the past with potentially discriminatory effects and reductionist justifications of essential diversities within the human species. Now, philosophy can assist cultural anthropology in updating old stereotyped worries about progressionism, overcoming a derived prejudice against naturalism as such. A coherent and analytical criticism of any form of teleological and progressive evolutionism could thus be a way to reconstruct the broken bridge between cultural anthropology and evolutionary studies (Panebianco and Serrelli 2016a). Cultural evolution also raises deep epistemological problems, not only about definitions of terms like ‘culture’, but also about the knowledge processes that are ongoing in this intensification of contact between the biological and social sciences (Serrelli 2016b, Panebianco and Serrelli 2016b).
b. Biology’s Critical Friend
As we have seen, philosophy of biology is expected to help science and to work hard to keep up with scientific research. But many authors point out that philosophy must not forget its critical role towards science. One perspective on philosophy of science sees it as an enterprise that aims
“to understand the life of science, that is, to understand the development of science as a Wittgensteinian family of ongoing human epistemic practices” (Reydon 2005: 252, cf. Grene and Depew 2004). Science can be seen as a part of culture and as a sub-system of society. This critical perspective on science, with its complex relationship with society, is always available to philosophers. Authors like Linda Van Speybroeck expressed the concern that philosophy of science might become “…a
servant of science, leaving science undisturbed and calling only for a
‘justification’ of the philosophical practice against scientific standards”
(Van Speybroeck 2007: 54).
Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of progressionism in paleontology and paleoanthropology, and his opposition to human racial classification and measurements of intelligence, are examples of constructive criticisms of the scientific enterprise. Current knowledge overwhelmingly shows that human evolution is a bushy tree of coexistent and sometimes interacting hominin species (compare Ruse 2012). But cultural and psychological biases have shaped science in some periods. Human evolution was expected to be, and represented as, a ladder of progress, a sequence of progressively more evolved hominid species, substituting one another, and approaching Homo sapiens, the climax species, often represented as a European male (Eldredge and Tattersall 1982). Stephen Jay Gould, in books such as Wonderful Life (1989), with a peculiar method that could be called an archaeology of scientific ideas (Pievani 2012a), coined expressions like the “iconography of hope” and tied them to social history, to some deep teleological preferences, and to our habit of using the present as a key for understanding the past. For many years, Gould fought for human evolution to be separated from human hopes, satisfying tales, and “great narratives.” He concentrated on the jargon, distinguishing evolution and progress, trend and finality, and stressing the ambiguous and appealing fashion for terms like “missing link.”
Gould’s critical metaphors put paleoanthropology in contact with the larger cultural context and deeper psychological roots, helping to reinforce the theoretical normalization of human evolution into a branching model of diversification of species, typical of the broader phylogenetic tree of primates.
Gould’s way of reasoning was particularly apt in showing that science is a human activity. Scientists work on the ground of cultural and social biases; they are not naïve collectors of neutral facts. Although Gould was not a sociological relativist, he showed in many cases the importance of history in shaping science, where ideas may also be dismissed and then taken up again. This attitude is also found in Eldredge and Gould’s (1972) famous “punctuated equilibria” paper, where the two paleontologists revealed the deep theory-laden nature of fossil interpretation. The ubiquitous pattern of evolutionary stasis over geological time periods was neglected since Darwin (1859), who considered fossils a constitutionally incomplete documentation. But the pattern of stasis and punctuation was, as Eldredge and Gould pointed out, data, not lack of data. “Phyletic gradualism” was a consolidated assumption that had been blinding even paleontologists towards their own data, while perpetuating the subordinate position of paleontologists with respect to theoretically important fields. In fact, Eldredge and Gould formulated a theory that explained punctuations as speciation events, and stasis by other processes. In doing so, they posed several problems, among which was the legitimation of paleontology as a theoretically relevant field.
In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Gould argued against the general scientific attitude of attaching “universal essences” to human disparities by measuring what is not measurable, like intelligence quotient, an
artificial construct. He also exposed unconscious manipulations of the anthropometric measurements and ranking of skulls in Samuel G.
Morton’s work (Crania Americana, 1839): Morton believed in “races” and in their polygenic origin, and he believed human intelligence was a unitary and inheritable object. Gould found his measurements as biased by his self-confirming preconceptions. For Gould, any scientist is an unconscious victim of his or her preconceptions. Recent studies of Morton’s material (Lewis et al., 2011) rehabilitated Morton’s original measurements. The authors hypothesized that Gould’s severe analysis was biased by his own aprioristic egalitarian and liberal cultural beliefs.
“In a paradoxical way Steve had proved his own point”, Ian Tattersall observed (2013). No scientist can be immune to this kind influences, against which, for Gould, “vigilance and scrutiny” are the necessary, although insufficient, palliations. Along these lines, philosophy of biology is invited to take on its critical constructive role towards science.
c. Developing Messages from Biology
Many topics in philosophy of biology are evidently relevant in the relationship between biology and the public. Deciding the meaning of concepts, like natural selection, fitness, or function, requires an understanding of the theories and their domains (Rosenberg and McShea 2008). Philosophy of biology clarifies, for example, that “‘natural selection’ is not an entirely apt name for the process [it identifies], as it misleadingly suggests the notions of choice, desire, and belief built into the theological account of adaptations” (p. 17) and corrects popular descriptions of evolution that make it look tautological and unscientific.
The notoriously slow-changing world of science education and public understanding is under pressure by the impressive rate of life sciences growth. In the popularization of science, hominid evolution is still depicted in a linear sequence of species from simple to complex, from inferior to superior, from archaic to modern. It exhibits intuitive power, not to neglect the prospective endurance of other influential pictures, like the tree of life, that are being questioned and made complex. And any time a naturalistic study of humans is carried out, misunderstandings and dangerous “genes-for-morality”-kind interpretations are just around the corner, both in the form of quick reductionistic and deterministic claims and in the form of a-priori anti-naturalistic positions. Even important scientific advances, like evo-devo and other fields that are pushing for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, can be negligently interpreted as breaking-offs, invalidating all the previous knowledge.
Opponents of science can use this to covertly reintroduce non-naturalist and non-scientific explanations. Instead, philosophy of biology could help citizens become more scientific, and more able to exploit the directional role they have towards science (cf. Haarsma et al. 2014-2015).
According to a principle called “scientific citizenship,” science should be properly understood by everyone in society. A fundamental pillar is a shared awareness of “the nature of science” which is the wealth of philosophical reflections about what is science, what is biology, how is our scientific knowledge best acquired, and how much can we be confident in it (Matthews 1994). What are the ways of thinking used in
biology that can help people to get a grasp of it? Are they similar to everyday ways of reasoning? What are the possible conceptual traps and pitfalls? What kind of knowledge can we expect from ecological simulations? What are model organisms, and why is it important to establish and fund them? What kinds of predictions can really be made, for example, in medicine or ecology? Understanding the probabilistic nature of predictions would produce not only a more educated picture of nature, but also, for example, an “awakening of public opinion to environmental problems, hydro-geological instability, and maintenance of territory” (Pievani 2012b: 352).
Philosophy of biology’s endeavor can sometimes go far away from day-to- day biology, and work out general pictures, messages, and worldviews. A classic and pervasive example is “Universal Darwinism,” developed by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others (Dawkins 1983) along a reasoning line from kin selection theory to a “gene’s eye view” to a
“replicator view”. According to the “selfish gene” part of the argument (Dawkins 1976), reliably replicating molecules (precursors of genes) would be at the origin of life, and organisms including humans would be late-comer vehicles built up in all their minute details by genes that survived the competition. The selfish gene has been particularly appealing and controversial for its philosophical implications. We are unaware machines for our genes, whose interests furthermore sometimes conflict with (and win over) ours. The selfish gene view even came to be considered the official version of Darwinism, being the one defended and advocated on many public stages against non-scientific views. Universal Darwinism is a philosophical view, according to which natural selection, intended as the selective retention and accumulation of blind variations that prove to be stable and fit, is the fundamental mechanism in the Universe. Many philosophers of biology fought these views and all their philosophical implications, seeing them as a hardly justified reification of some methodologically operationalized idealizations by population genetics (Oyama et al. 2001). Other lines of attack were the incredible polisemy and theoretical complexity of “gene” and the ongoing revision of their causal power on the organism (Griffths and Stotz 2013). Critics were all the more motivated by their discontent with the picture of evolutionary biology that was being conveyed to the public and to philosophy by the selfish gene view. Many philosophers pointed out that natural selection is arbitrarily chosen as a process to be universalized into a general philosophical view (Godfrey-Smith 2009), and some outlined provocative alternative views like Universal Symbiogenesis (Gontier 2007).
Other philosophical views were elaborated from the importance of chance, randomness, and, more comprehensively, contingency in evolution. Philosophers point out studies demonstrating that chance variation can influence evolutionary outcomes without being constrained or directed: “Evolutionary divergence is sometimes due to differences in the order of appearance of chance variations, and not to differences in
the direction of selection” (Beatty 2010: 39). Since the 1980s, the neutral theory of genetic evolution promoted by Motoo Kimura (Ohta & Kimura 1971), now developed in weak neutralism in the scientific community (Hartl & Clark 2007), exposed the huge proportion of neutral variation all around. Population genetics models show that important events like speciation can well happen in conditions of fitness neutrality (Gavrilets 2004). Much earlier, population geneticists demonstrated the importance of drift (see above, 2.a). But is evolution random or contingent at any spatio-temporal scale? Are there law-like tendencies in large-scale evolution? If so, do these concern adaptedness, complexity, or other features? Since environments change over time, “what is adaptive”
changes constantly through evolutionary time, so there is no strict commitment in the Darwinian theory to long-term adaptive progress or trends (Serrelli and Gontier 2015a).
Are trends towards greater complexity a better candidate? Some philosophers think so (McShea and Brandon 2010). Others think that nothing in the current understanding of evolution predicts a drive towards increased complexity. Another main disagreement concerns how to define complexity— is it through the integrated organization of interrelated parts in a whole or just through the number and diversity of parts? Some philosophers see evolution as a texture of contingent histories, the most ordinary—but most relevant to us—being the story of our species and their relatives. The human tree is just like that of other mammals. This emerging view is very different from the one inspired by Universal Darwinism:
Evolution is a process that abounds in redundancies and imperfections, and adaptation could be a collateral effect rather than a direct optimisation. Biology is a field of potentialities, and not determinations….
Complex organisms exist thanks to imperfections, to multiplicity of use and redundancy. (Pievani 2012a: 142)
For authors like Stephen Jay Gould, the preeminence of ecological contingencies and macro-evolutionary patterns, like mass-extinctions, in natural history seems to dismiss any idea of progress in evolution:
We are the offspring of the material and contingent relationships between localised populations and ever-changing environments. The massive contingency of human evolution means that particular events, or apparently meaningless details, were able to shape irreversibly the course of natural history. (Ivi: 139)
Some theorists identify the source of contingency in the complex interplay between ecological systems and genealogical entities at multiple and very diverse scales (Eldredge et al. 2016).
From the disruption of the idea of a great progressive tendency in evolution, in particular human evolution, some philosophers develop general implications. Evolutionary humility results from a naturalistic way of seeing Homo sapiens as a part of a contingent process and not as its culmination. From another point of view, the discovery of the determinant role of contingent ecological events like floods and earthquakes gives a new vision of nature. Nature is neither a harmonic Eden nor a wicked nemesis. “The expressions of violence and unpredictability of natural phenomena that shock our societies so much today are the normal ecological niches where we were born. We would not be here at this moment without them” (Pievani 2012b: 352).
6. Scientifically Up-to-Date Philosophy
In a famous paper titled “What the philosophy of biology is not,” David Hull wrote that any work in philosophy of biology should not skip “all the intricacy of evolutionary relationships, the difficulties with various mechanisms, the recalcitrant data, the wealth of supporting evidence”
(Hull 1969: 162). Along the same line, philosophy of biology tends to be grounded on deep knowledge and understanding of current biology by maintaining a non-episodic familiarity with many fields that are outside philosophical specialization.
It is important to keep in mind that the life sciences and their objects change and grow. A basic example is the very definition of “life”
(bios). Answers, as well as philosophical problems, for such a topic come, for example, from scientific research on the origin of life (Penny 2005) or the search for extra-terrestrial life. The origin of life has been considered as a backwards extension of the roots of the tree of common descent. It regresses from some universal “ancestral organisms” (LUCA, Last Universal Common Ancestor) to simpler, minimally living entities that might be referred to as “protoliving systems,” and it further dissolves into non-living matter along several dimensions (Malaterre 2010). In general, philosophers work together with biologists on interpreting the history of life, for example, on trying to make sense of major evolutionary transitions (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995). The symbiogenesis of eukaryotes and the advent of multicellularity are examples of major transitions. Those few moments in the history of life may be seen as points of emergence of a new level of organization. Today the very idea of a tree of life is being challenged by evidence of massive transfers and blurred boundaries among its branches (O’Malley 2010a). The history of biology is a history of changing views of life and of its history, and philosophy of biology participates into this process.
In the 50 years of existence of philosophy of biology as an academic field, the expansion of life sciences has been explosive. Huge global problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, new forms of diseases, and needs for resource management in our societies have contributed to that growth. Life sciences, including biomedical, ecological, and microbiological fields, have faced challenges related to the Modern world, not only by being called into question or by actively catching opportunities to develop big research projects and programs but also by
contributing to the very discovery and perception of those challenges. In parallel, life sciences have seen incredible technical advancements:
cheaper and faster technologies for DNA sequencing and molecular analysis; computational methods allowing analysis of billions nucleotides in search for the most likely phylogeny and simulations of evolution of proteins or complex phenotypes; huge shared information databases like the genome projects (such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), particularly the Human Genome and the various “–omics” projects monitoring whole complexes of functional molecules; finally, the applications of these technical advancements in creating new kinds of organisms or in disease detection and therapy. A parallel phenomenon of the decades leading into the 21st century has been the explosion and availability of scientific literature and access.
What are the consequences for philosophy of biology? The discipline is supposed to have a role not only in understanding, describing, and communicating science but also in aiding the development of scientific programs. Given the explosive historical dynamics outlined above, almost every subfield of biology requires much of a philosopher to delve into its peculiar concepts, methods, objects, and conceptual issues. Hence, several presentations of philosophy of biology follow a field-by-field criterion, enumerating items like “philosophy of ecology” or “philosophy of molecular biology” (Griffiths 2011). Such multi-field presentations reflect the dynamic and lively development of biology. Meanwhile, periodical shifts of focus and emergence of new fields and techniques in the scientific literature, attract the curiosity and calling for the contribution of philosophers. But the identities of supposed sub-fields like
“philosophy of ecology” or “philosophy of microbiology” are not crystallized, and rarely will a philosopher of biology self-limits to one sub- field. Therefore, the field-by-field approach is not followed here.
This first section provides a few examples of how philosophers of biology can chase the developments of some particular field of life sciences. In certain moments, this pursuit can lead to extensions of philosophy of biology itself to embrace not only new scientific knowledge, but also newborn ways of doing science. Furthermore, deep revisions of philosophical approaches themselves may be necessary to address new aspects of science, namely facets of scientific practice. The examples concern molecular studies of gene exchange that started in microbial evolution, advances in ecological modeling, and the construction and management of model organisms.
a. Questioning Influential Ideas
In recent years, several philosophers have become interested in the growing evidence for a variety of gene exchange mechanisms widespread in fungi, plants, and animals, not only in prokaryotes (unicellular organisms that have long been known to wildly transform, conjugate and acquire DNA by transduction). Following biologists such as W. Ford Doolittle, philosophers contrasted this evidence with the idea of a universal tree of life as a tree of sexually reproducing, genetically isolated species that multiply by genetic isolation. For O’Malley (2010b), the idea of a universal tree of life has come to be an unacceptable reach
given the abundance of reticulation and lateral gene transfer (LGT) in all kinds of organisms, including animals. O’Malley proposed to give up an animal-centric philosophy of evolution. Its key tenets are that the BSC (Biological Species Concept) is ‘universal’ to species-forming organisms, that bifurcating lines of descent are all that matter in ancestry reconstruction, and that the rest of life (non-animal) is simpler, less diverse, and less ‘true’ evolutionarily. The consequences of [such an]
animal-centric philosophy of evolution are that it can include at best a severely truncated history of evolutionary events. (p. 544)
The animal-based, constraining idea of a universal tree of life was consolidated around the mid-20th century through an attempt of
“excluding the messy”, such as prokaryotes and bacteria. For O’Malley, such exclusion was mainly due to the influence of ornithologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr.
As this example illustrates, philosophers, by following frontier developments of particular fields, can sense the need for a revision of overarching theoretical choices and frames of biology. At the same time, they can wriggle out of canonical problems and concepts and expand their philosophical interests: “It is definitely the case – for O’Malley – that philosophy of biology has undergone a rapid radiation of topics in the last decade and this has meant going beyond Mayr’s focus” (544). The resilience of issues like the species concept, molded on animal breeding, is pushed by new concepts amenable to philosophical analysis. Further, the very task and range of philosophy of biology happen to be questioned: “Mayr’s vision of philosophy of biology as the clarification of evolutionary concepts has…been challenged” (O’Malley 2010b: 531).
b. Understanding New Scientific Practices
According to philosopher Thomas Pradeu (2009), ecology has made “a conspicuous and very welcome entry” in philosophy of biology, and several philosophers advocate aspects of ecology as targets of philosophical attention. Ecology has its own epistemological issues, for example, the weakness of ecological laws, the debate around the idea of balance of nature, the complex problem of the predictive value of ecological models, and the involvement in environmental decision making (Cooper 2003, Mikkelson 2007, Plutynski 2008). Other problems concern the individuation of ecological units, scale-dependence, and generalizability of ecological models. Some philosophers got interested in new modeling methodologies of ecological inquiry, the area of the following example.
Ecologist Steven Peck (2008) contributed to the debate from the standpoint of an author of complex computer simulations. He pointed out the many differences between simulations and “analytic models” which can be written as mathematical equations. In simulations, many of the entities, “dispositions,” rules, and relationships, are not captured by any equation, rather they are directly written in computer code: “conditional if-then statements, looping structures, and calls to procedures” (Peck
2008: 390). Moreover, simulations are not at all complicated versions of analytic models because, as Peck explains,
The complex computer representation is an ecological system. One that you have complete control over, but which provides insights and allows complex behavior to bubble up from lower level processes and allows one to capture the emergent behavior often seen in ecological systems. (p.
387)For Peck, models of this kind are provocative for philosophical issues, such as what are models? What are their aims? How do they work? A classic and influential framework by Richard Levins (1966) identifies three constraints among which a model has to trade-off—generality, precision, and realism. But building a simulation, for Peck, does not consist in adding more variables and parameters in order to capture more parts and processes of some targeted biological system. It is a creative effort yielding something autonomous with interesting but complex relationships with other models and with the world. Some notions in the philosophy of modeling can make a step in the direction of simulations, like the idea of “indirect representation” in which the model descriptions themselves are examined as opposed to “direct representation” in which representation is used to describe a real-world system (Godfrey-Smith 2006). But this distinction for Peck is not enough to capture the fact that simulations become experimental systems in themselves. Playing with the model means a “bracketing out of nature to explore the model itself [yielding] important insights to the model – separate from what it is supposed to represent” (Peck 2008: 395).
Complex computer simulations push philosophy of biology to reflect on new accounts of model building and interpretation, and also to deal with new ways in which scientific communities structure themselves.
c. Rethinking the Philosophical Approach from New Ways of Doing Science
Chasing the state of the art of life sciences—even of one or few fields at once—is very demanding. By doing it, however, philosophers of biology can continually fuel their thought. We have seen, for example, that philosophers, relying on molecular discoveries about gene exchange, can revise their agenda, downplaying traditionally-framed problems (for example, what is a species?) and even questioning great background pictures against which biology is thought (the tree of life, for example).
By striving to understand scientific methodologies, including completely new ones such as computer simulations in ecology, philosophers are brought to probe their accounts of science to work out new ones, and to get a better hold on them and their connections. Related to all these efforts there is another tension in philosophy of science, which has been made explicit in the last few years: the philosophical orientation toward scientific practice (Boumans and Leonelli 2013). A recent trend, represented, for example, by the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP), is pointing out the limits of an exclusive use
of conceptual analysis, proposing instead “a philosophy of scientific practice based on an analytic framework that takes into consideration theory, practice and the world simultaneously” (Boumans et al. 2011).
Practice is defined as an ensemble of “organized or regulated activities aimed at the achievement of certain goals” and is an object of philosophical reflection.
Steven Peck’s analysis of ecological simulation, mentioned earlier, can also be seen as an example of a call to scientific practice. For Peck, simulations are more of experimental systems than representations. A simulation is useful because it helps “thinking more deeply and creatively into the nature of the problem” (Peck 2008: 396), but it can be appreciated only by considering the community in which the authors of the simulation are present and maintain the simulation (otherwise, the simulation dies because it cannot be understood or replicated by others).
Crucial aspects are the authors’ willingness to expose the multiple perspectives that are encoded in the simulation, to confront them with other modelers and with “those who study the ecology of natural systems directly” (p. 399), and the authors’ engagement in discussing, modifying, and exploring the simulation further. In this new kind of engagement, Peck sees a “hermeneutic circle,” a “back and forth conversation among modelers, their models, and those who study the ecology of natural systems directly” characterized by each actor’s attempt to “understand her own perspective in light of others’ perspectives.” The hermeneutic circle is, for Peck, what “opens the door to deeper understanding of what the simulation model is showing us about the world” (p. 399). Scientific community practices are crucial for understanding what’s going on.
Logical analysis, either of the model alone or of its relationships with some natural ecological system, does not seem to bring philosophy a long way.
Another example of a rising scientific practice is constituted by model organisms, a term introduced in the late 1990s and becoming more and more used. Official lists of model organisms include species such as the mouse, zebrafish, fruit fly, nematode worm, thale cress. Mice and other animals are extremely important in biomedical research due to the extrapolations to Homo sapiens that are considered possible with some conditions (Piotrowska 2013). In philosophy of biology, there has been interest in understanding what “model organisms” are and in demarcating them against the larger set of experimental organisms.
Ankeny and Leonelli (2011) define model organisms as:
Non-human species that are extensively studied in order to understand a range of biological phenomena, with the hope that data and theories generated through use of the model will be applicable to other organisms, particularly those that are in some way more complex than the original model. (p. 313)
The two philosophers work out several concepts embedded in this definition in order to capture the specificity of model organisms. For the issue at hand, the most important aspect is the new kind of structured scientific communities that maintain a model organism stable in space
and time. Examples of model organisms are the fly Drosophila melanogaster that has been studied since the dawn of genetics, knockout mice Mus musculus, and the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The research community of a model organism performs intensive research with “a strong ethos of sharing resource materials, techniques, and data” (p.
317). While initially the organism can be chosen for experimental advantages (being easy to breed, for example), the cumulative establishment of techniques, practices, and results—for example, through databases and stock centers—leads to self-reinforcing standardization, comparability, and stability: “…the more the model system is studied, and the greater the number of perspectives from which it is understood, the more it becomes established as a model system” (Creager et al. 2007: 6).
To summarize, a recent stream in philosophy of biology associates the need for first-hand, recent, and deep scientific information with a need to consider newly emerged scientific practices that often involve innovative scientific communities and that are capable to generate new questions. It is no surprise that philosopher Leonelli, in a paper on different modes of abstraction that are performed by different communities on the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, writes: “Focusing primarily on modelling practices, rather than on models thus produced, might prove a useful way to gain insight on some long-standing debates within the philosophy of scientific modelling and representation” (Leonelli 2007: 510). By following biology, philosophy rethinks its own methods and foundations.
7. History and Philosophy of Biology
Good philosophy of biology may be done non-historically, by working in a purely conceptual way. On the other hand, philosophy is sometimes specifically interested in grand historical processes. The inception of empirical and theoretical novelties and the birth of whole new fields provide the opportunity to probe classic accounts of scientific change such as Popper’s falsificationism (Popper 1935, 1963), Kuhn’s paradigm change (Kuhn 1962), Lakatos’s methodology of scientific programmes (Lakatos 1970), or Kitcher’s theoretical unification (Kitcher 1981). Philosophical categories such as reductionism can be tested in their capability to account for the historical relationships between biological fields. At the birth of molecular genetics, for example, a philosophical question was whether the older Mendelian genetics was being reduced to it. As Griffiths (2010) remarks, philosophers of biology achieved more adequate models of theory by debating whether or not the molecular revolution in biology was a case of successful scientific reduction.
At all scales, philosophy of biology has a constant need to refer to history, while some authors complain that philosophy of biology pays too little attention “to the question how and why things in the field have become the way they are today” (Reydon 2005: 149-150). The rediscovered interdependence between history and philosophy of biology may be seen in light of the more general problem of the “history and philosophy of science” (HPS) studies, which has been viewed in a more integrated way.
The recursive and expansive dynamics between history and philosophy of
biology proves to be a generator of dense and complex elaborations in all the involved fields.
James Griesemer (2007) constitutes an example of how philosophical views serve historical analysis. The topic is the molecular study of development at the heart of evo-devo (see also 5.a). Griesemer suggests a revision of conventional narratives that describe evo-devo as a union between genetics and development, the study of which was supposedly abandoned since the 1930s (see Gilbert et al. 1996). For Griesemer this separation between fields is artificial: embryology and genetics have always been “like the segments of a centipede: moving together with limited autonomy” (p. 376). Griesemer’s long, reframing argument goes through the philosophical characterization of scientists as process followers: “there is no doubt that scientists do follow processes, that this is an important and central activity in their work, and that they achieve causal understanding as a result of doing it” (p.
377). Research styles, are, for Griesemer, “commitments to follow processes in a certain way.” Griesemer constructs the idea of genetics and embryology as nothing but research styles that “package commitments to follow processes according to particular sorts of marking interactions and tracking conventions together with commitments to represent processes in particular ways” (p. 381). In this view, the separation between genes and development ceases to be considered as an ontological divide: “It does not follow from the divergence of research styles and representational practices in genetics and embryology that nature is divided into separate processes of heredity and development” (p. 414). An important ingredient of Griesemer’s view is the use of representations with their dual course. Before being pressed into service as tools for communicating results and interpretations, representations are “working objects, developed as bench or field tools for tracking phenomena and following processes” (p. 388). Scientists, to be able to follow processes, produce representations that, in turn,
“provide reinforcing feedback that organizes attention into foreground and background concerns” (p. 380). This dynamic becomes important when representations survive the experimental work in which they are produced and get used by other scientists. In scientific communities, process-marking and process-following strongly reinforce each other in an attention-guiding feedback, operated by representations. Griesemer analyzes Gregor Mendel’s experiments and describes Mendel—
universally considered as the founding father of genetics—as a process follower and as a developmentalist. The different and successive notations appearing in Mendel’s writings (for example, A + 2Aa + a; then A + A + a + a) are the representations sequentially devised by Mendel in order to follow his enduring interest, that is, the developmental process of hybrids. Therefore, in this account, Mendel was a developmentalist who offered lasting representations that, in turn, helped some of his followers to focus on patterns of intergenerational transmission, backgrounding development. A particular power is given, in this account, to representations like Mendel’s notation: “In Mendel’s