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The phenomena of homology

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Abstract

Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Twenty years ago the ‘new experimentalist’ movement in philosophy of science drew attention to the fact that many experimental phenomena have a ‘life of their own’: the conviction that they are real is not dependent on the theories used to characterise and explain them. I suggest that something similar can be true of descriptive phenomena, and that many homologies are phenomena of this kind. As a result the descriptive biology of form and function has a life of its own—a degree of epistemological independence from the theories that explain form and function. I also suggest that the two major ‘homology concepts’ in contemporary biology, usually seen as two competing definitions, are in reality complementary elements of the biological explanation of homology.

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Notes

  1. While I believe that the picture of the role of the homology concept in biological thought I give here is broadly accurate, for reasons of space my treatment of the history is sketchy in the extreme. For more detailed and no doubt more accurate accounts, see (Camardi 2001; Gilbert 1991; Lenoir 1989; Laubichler and Maienschein 2007; Richards 1992; Williams 2004), on all of which I have drawn freely. The same constraint prevents me giving a full account of the recent biological literature on the homology concept, and on character identity more generally, for which see (Bock and Cardew 1999; Hall 1994, 2003; Hall and Olson 2003; Wagner 2001). For recent specifically philosophical work on the homology concept, see (Brigandt 2002, 2003a, 2006; Griffiths 2006; Love 2001, 2007; Matthen 1998, 2000) and the other papers in this issue.

  2. For a thorough philosophical treatment of this kind of phylogenetic inference, see Sober (1988).

  3. For an English translation, see Riedl (1978). For historical treatments of early 19th century comparative anatomy, see references in footnote 1.

  4. Examples are given in my (2006). For discussions of this important topic of ‘levels of homology’, see Brigandt (this issue), Ereshefsky (this issue), Love (this issue), and the biological works cited in footnote 1.

  5. Xenology has no real morphological counterpart, although the sharing of heritable endosymbionts in some ways resembles xenology.

  6. This usage remains controversial because ‘syntenic’ also means ‘physically located on the same chromosome’.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Alan Love, Mohan Matthen, Marc Ereshefsky, and especially Ingo Brigandt for detailed feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Quadrangle A14, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Paul E. Griffiths

  2. ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter, Byrne House, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, UK

    Paul E. Griffiths

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Griffiths, P.E. The phenomena of homology. Biol Philos 22, 643–658 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9090-x

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