Abstract
We argue that the economy of nature constitutes an invocation of structure in the biological sciences, one largely missed by philosophers of biology despite the turn in recent years toward structural explanations throughout the philosophy of science. We trace a portion of the history of this concept, beginning with the theologically and economically grounded work of Linnaeus, moving through Darwin’s adaptation of the economy of nature and its reconstitution in genetic terms during the first decades of the Modern Synthesis. What this historical case study reveals, we argue, is a window into the shifting landscape of the explanatory and ontic uses of structural concepts. In Linnaeus, the economy of nature has both ontic and explanatory import; in Darwin the ontic and explanatory aspects start to come apart (with the explanatory aspect being foregrounded); and finally, in the Modern Synthesis, the economy of nature is replaced by the conceptual toolkit of population genetics, the structural elements of which are nearly entirely explanatory. Having traced a historical trajectory of structural concepts that moves from an ontic formulation to an increasingly explanatory one, we conclude by outlining some insights for structural realism.
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Notes
Ladyman is not here offering an endorsement of ESR, but instead a very clear explication of the content of the view. See Ladyman and Ross (2007, pp. 124–129) for an especially nice reconstruction of ESR, and a pointed argument against it (and in favor of OSR).
A similar separation between metaphysical/ontic and epistemic/explanatory roles has been made in the case of the scientific models literature by Rohwer and Rice (2016).
As an aside, it is difficult to discern exactly what McMullin’s own views on the ontic role for structure are, as he (perhaps intentionally) keeps his metaphysical commitments tentative. He says, for example, that structure is “taken to account casually for the observable phenomena” (1984, 26), and that structures “provide an increasingly accurate insight into the real structures that are causally responsible for the phenomena being explained” (1984, 30), but also rejects the claim that “acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true” (1984, 35).
It seems plausible that to call germinal fluids “rational” supports the notion that the natural world contains essentially structural elements. God, after all, is (usually) taken to be essentially rational, and here it may be understood that the world is “pre-structured” to reflect God’s image in this way.
“Dissertations,” in eighteenth-century Sweden, were, as we learn in the preface to one translated collection, “the works of the most capital disciples of [Linnaeus’s] school, composed under the direction of its illustrious founder Linnaeus, and very frequently dictated by him” (Linnaeus 1781, 1:v–vi). Thus the Oeconomy of Nature dissertation, listed as by one “Isaac J. Biberg,” was dictated to Biberg by Linnaeus, and likewise with the Police of Nature. This question of authorship is illuminatingly explored by Stauffer (1960, 239). The two editions cited are the English translations read by Darwin; the translation of Police of Nature is unfortunately highly abridged by the translator.
For an illuminating analysis of the “polity of nature” idea, see Pearce (2009).
Koerner cites (and quotes) a sermon delivered by Linnaeus (1763), which was given in the form of a “eulogy to animals.” He attempts to image a “world without beasts,” and claims that without them the world could not properly regulate itself.
Notably, to avoid straying too far into the history of ecology, we will for the purposes of this paper bracket discussion of the term “niche” as a potential further locus where the “economy of nature” (or, more precisely, the concept of “places” within the economy of nature) might find its way into the history of evolution. We will briefly return to ideas arising from the history of ecology in section 4.
Completing the standard picture of selection in the Origin, Darwin adds the analogy with artificial selection the following week (Darwin 1860, E 63). For more information on this pivotal period, see Ospovat (1981) and Hodge (2009b). Stauffer also summarizes many of the relevant sources for Darwin’s use of the EoN (1960, 235–36).
While much ink has been spilled over the putative reason for this seeming cessation in Darwin’s work (see helpful discussion in Ruse 2009), this need not concern us here.
Unlike Linnaeus, Darwin uses the concepts of the “economy” and the “polity” of nature interchangeably.
No teleological reading is meant by the use of “structured” here – we do not, for example, claim that this structure somehow directly causes organic change in nature to move in particular directions or paths.
This makes “economy of nature,” even at its peak, around tenfold less common in Nature than “natural selection.” This analysis was performed using the evoText website (Ramsey and Pence 2016), http://www.evotext.org. The data from this analysis are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3189625.
This view still holds currency today. Godfrey-Smith, for example, argues that one of the modes of action of natural selection is to “make a combination of traits more likely to appear by changing the array of backgrounds against which mutations arise,” and considers the “absolute number of appropriate ‘slots’” in which the occurrence of a mutation might produce a complex feature (Godfrey-Smith 2009, 50).
This is also interestingly complicated by some of Wright’s later work on the desert plant Linanthus, for instance (see Ishida 2017). While Wright takes this work as a broad confirmation of his Shifting Balance Theory, there is an emergent emphasis on the role of geographical distribution in population dynamics, which takes him a step or two closer to the genetic ecologists of the time. Even so, selection and drift occupy center stage throughout his work.
Compare, for example, Pearce’s claim that “as Lyell believed that changing physical and biological circumstances could affect the stations of animals, Darwin believed that these same changes could create new places in the economy of nature” (Pearce 2009, 518).
Though this is by no means the only problem afoot in biological ontology – boundaries of individuals, populations, species, genes, and more all come under some degree of debate.
To do so successfully would require the resolution of the potential circularity in the grounding of the EoN that we raised for Darwin, a task that we cannot pursue here.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, whose comments were extensive, charitable, and made the paper substantially better. Thanks to Trevor Pearce, Betty Smocovitis, and Michael Weisberg for comments on a previous version of this paper. Finally, thanks to an audience at the Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy Seminar at KU Leuven, especially Hugh Desmond, Jan Heylen, and Grant Ramsey; an audience at the History of Science and Contemporary Scientific Realism conference, especially Anjan Chakravartty, Mark Fuller, Stuart Glennan, Ioan Muntean, and Aaron Novick; and an audience at the Louisiana State University Philosophy Salon, especially Bradley Wood, William Eberhard, and Dolores Cowie.
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Pence, C.H., Swaim, D.G. The economy of nature: the structure of evolution in Linnaeus, Darwin, and the modern synthesis. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 8, 435–454 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-017-0194-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-017-0194-0