Abstract
Robustness is a pervasive property of living systems, instantiated at all levels of the biological hierarchies (including ecology). As several other usual concepts in evolutionary biology, such as plasticity or dominance, it has been questioned from the viewpoint of its consequences upon evolution as well as from the side of its causes, on an ultimate or proximate viewpoint. It is therefore equally the explanandum for some enquiries in evolution in ecology, and the explanans for some interesting evolutionary phenomena such as evolvability. This epistemological fact instantiates general property of biological evolution that I call “explanatory reversibility”. In this chapter, I attempt to systematize the explanatory projects regarding robustness by distinguishing a set of epistemological questions. Are they the various expressions of one general project with specific key concepts and methods, or very disparate epistemic projects, unified by the mere homonymy of the term “robustness”? More precisely, are there specific kinds of explanations suited to explain robustness? Finally, how does robustness as an explanandum connect with other explananda in which evolutionists have been massively interested recently such as complexity, modularity or evolvability? After having initially explored various meanings of the concept of robustness and surveyed its instances in biology, I will propose a distinction between mechanical and structural explanations of robustness in evolutionary and functional biology. Then, among the latter, I will highlight the class of “topological explanations,” and the subclass of explanations based on networks, as a major explanatory tool to address robustness. Focusing on evolutionary issues, I will eventually address the “explanatory reversibility” of robustness and consider its relation to key evolutionary concepts that are also explanatorily revertible such as modularity, evolvability and complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
See Canguilhem (1977) for a historical account.
- 2.
See Huneman 2017, §3, for an account of explanations relying on the Central Limit Theorem as paradigmatic of structural explanations .
- 3.
This may be sometimes confusing because evolutionary biology includes many questions about functions, and there is even a way of making sense of the very concept of functions in terms of evolutionary facts, which is widely shared by philosophers under the label “etiological view of function” (Wright 1973; see Huneman 2013, for a current overview). However in the present context the label “functional” should not be misleading.
- 4.
For an alternative view of the evolution of mutational robustness see Van Nimwegen et al. (1999).
- 5.
See Nicoglou (2015) for an account of those controversies.
- 6.
Many definitions of « module » exist, and for a given system, many partition into ‘modules’ are possible, as Winther (2011) argues. Here, I take modules following the famous definition by Simon (1969), namely, within a system of interacting elements, a subset of elements that do interact within itself more than with other elements. Networks provide a way to identify modules, by running clustering analyses and pinpointing the major clusters.
- 7.
A tentative way to do that is Huneman (2015b).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Anya Plutynski, Nick Jones, Carl Craver and Matteo Mossio for helpful comments and discussions on the arguments presented in this paper. Many thanks to the editors of the volume, whose careful reading improved the manuscript. I also thank Andrew McFarland for his thorough language-check. I am finally grateful to an anonymous reviewer for constructive criticism. This work was possible thanks to the grant ANR--13-BSH3-0007 Explabio and the LIA CNRS Paris “Montreal ECIEB.”
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Huneman, P. (2018). Robustness: The Explanatory Picture. In: Bertolaso, M., Caianiello, S., Serrelli, E. (eds) Biological Robustness. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01198-7_5
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