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Biology’s Functional Perspective: Roles, Advantages and Organization

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The Philosophy of Biology

Part of the book series: History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences ((HPTL,volume 1))

Abstract

This chapter discusses biology’s functional perspective: what it amounts to, why it is essential and how it differs from our everyday intuitions. Using an explanation of the emperor penguin’s two-voice system as an example, I outline the main characteristics of the functional approach: it views organisms as solutions to the problem to stay alive, it uses role functions to explain how organisms solve this problem, and explains an organism’s features by pointing to the advantages of these features in solving the problems of life. Such an approach is justified because the very existence of organisms depends on their ability to solve these problems and because this ability critically depends on the characteristics of the organism’s parts, their arrangement, and the order and timing of their activities. The functional perspective is the biologist’s way to take this organization into account. However, to deal with the problem of how organization and adaptation come about, pre-Darwinian functional biologists thought of functions not merely as roles in an organization, but as the purposes for which the parts and activities of an organism are generated. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection abolished the need to explain adaptation and, hence, the need for a teleological interpretation of the functional perspective. Functional explanations differ from evolutionary explanations in their concern with individual level relations (evolutionary explanations are population level explanations), and from both teleological and evolutionary explanations in their concern with what is needed to stay alive as opposed to how traits come about. Finally, I explain how the functional approach in biology differs from our intuitions about function by comparing functional reasoning in biology with the teleological notion of function developed by naturalistic philosophers at the end of the twentieth century. This construct is firmly grounded in evolutionary theory and accounts for the intuitions that functions are explanatory, normative and teleological, but doesn’t fit with the way in which biologists reason about function.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wimsatt uses the term ‘emergence’ where Craver and I use ‘organization’.

  2. 2.

    See Schlosser (1998), McLaughlin (2001), Christensen and Bickhard (2002), Delancey (2006), Mossio et al. (2009) and Saborido et al. (2011) for accounts of function in terms of self-maintenance. My account differs from such accounts in two ways. First, in my account self-maintenance is a condition for being alive, but not for having functions. Second, in my account functional explanations explain why a trait is needed for continued existence of the organism, but not how the trait is maintained in the organism.

  3. 3.

    The artifacts themselves do not have artifact functions. I think they have social functions, but that is a topic for another paper.

  4. 4.

    An experienced typist can use an AZERTY key board on a computer configured for a QWERTY one, but I doubt that it will be possible to process text with a computer that prints a Q where there is an A on the screen, a Z where there is a W, and so on.

  5. 5.

    The functional perspective is equally applicable to other kinds of organisms such as plants and bacteria. Because I am more familiar with zoology than with plant biology and microbiology, most of my examples are from zoology. I apologize for this unfortunate bias.

  6. 6.

    See Canfield (1964, 1965), Ruse (1971), Wimsatt (1972), Bigelow and Pargetter (1987), and Horan (1989) for ‘life chances’ or ‘forward looking’ accounts of function, Frankfurt and Poole (1966), Mitchell (1993, 1995) and Millikan (1989a, 1993) for criticism, and Wouters (2003) for a response to some of those criticisms. In my view, life chances accounts are basically right as accounts of biological advantages, but not as accounts of biological roles, and they fail to account for the explanatory force of functional explanation by viewing them as forward looking nomological or causal explanations, rather than as non-causal explanations of what is needed to stay alive.

  7. 7.

    These issues are often presented as ‘the four problems of behavioral biology’ and typically attributed to Tinbergen (1963). Tinbergen himself, however, emphasizes that ‘the questions we ask’ are ‘the same throughout Biology’ (p. 411) and refers to them as ‘the four problems of Biology’ (p. 426). Similar frameworks can be found in other biological disciplines (e.g. Huxley 1942: 40; Dullemeijer 1974: 95). See Dewsbury (1992) and Wouters (2005c) for more extensive discussion.

  8. 8.

    See Gould and Lewontin (1979), Lewontin (1981), Coddington (1988), Harvey and Pagel (1991), Brooks and McLennan (1991) and Reiss (2009) for extensive criticism of the view that in order to explain the evolution of a trait it suffices to point out its functional advantages.

  9. 9.

    If the variants in the set do not occur, the variant is maintained by lack of variation rather than by selection; if there occur variants that are not in the set used for the fitness analysis, that analysis doesn’t show that the prevailing traits is the fittest.

  10. 10.

    See Wright (1972), Neander (1980, 1983, 1991a, b), Millikan (1984, 1989b), Mitchell (1989, 1995), Brandon (1990), Griffiths (1993), Godfrey-Smith (1994), Buller (1998), Schwartz (1999; 2002), and Garson (2011) for expositions and defenses of teleological theories of function, and Boorse (1976), Kitcher (1993), Amundson and Lauder (1994), Walsh (1996), Davies (2001), Cummins (2002), and Wouters (2003) for criticism.

  11. 11.

    ‘adaptive value’ is Study & Moony’s term for what I call ‘biological advantage’.

  12. 12.

    Lewens (2004) presents an interesting investigation of the assumed analogy between artifact design and biological function. Like many philosophers, he takes it for granted that function talk in biology is rooted in this analogy. In his view, the main connotations of the notion of function derived from artifact design are the idea that function ascriptions are explanatory and normative and that function attributions distinguish functions from accidents. Lewens argues that there are several ways to construct the analogy between biological and artifact function but that none of them perfectly matches these connotations. He draws the conclusion that the analogy between artifact design and organic evolution is not strong enough to warrant these ideas. Function talk is therefore (according to Lewens) merely a heuristic tool to draw conclusions about likely effects of selection. I agree with Lewens’ conclusion about the weakness of the analogy between the processes of artifact design and organic evolution. However, I don’t see that as a reason to put function talk aside as merely heuristic: in my view, function talk is not rooted in an analogy between these processes, but in the organized character of their products.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burg. Oudlaan 50, 3062 PA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Arno G. Wouters

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  1. Educational Research & Development, Geitonas School, Vari Attikis, Athens, 1234, Attiki, Greece

    Kostas Kampourakis

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Wouters, A.G. (2013). Biology’s Functional Perspective: Roles, Advantages and Organization. In: Kampourakis, K. (eds) The Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6537-5_21

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