Abstract
Explanations in genetics have intriguing aspects to both biologists and philosophers, and there is no account that satisfactorily elucidates such explanations. The aim of this article is to analyze the kind of explanations usually given in Classical (Transmission) Genetics (CG) and to present in detail the application of an account of explanation as ampliative, specialized nomological embedding to elucidate the such explanations. First, we present explanations in CG in the classical format of inferences with the explanans as the premises and the explanandum as the conclusion and compare them with explanations in other paradigmatic explanatory fields such as Classical Mechanics. Second, we summarize the main aspects discussed in the literature with regard the peculiarities of genetic explanations. Third, we introduce the account of scientific explanation as ampliative, specialized nomological embedding making use of Sneedian structuralism, in particular the notions of theory-net, fundamental law or guiding principle, specialization, and special laws. Finally, we apply this account to the case of CG and show that this analysis sheds light to the intriguing aspects of genetic explanations and remove most of their alleged oddities.
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Notes
In a broadly, though admittedly not universally, accepted account according to which causation is a relation between particular events in virtue of such events exemplifying general types involved in counterfactual-supporting regularities.
It is not the aim of this paper to carry out a historical and systematic analysis of the relationship between Classical Genetics and Molecular Genetics. However, we would like to point out that, with the emergence of Molecular Genetics, Classical Genetics was neither displaced, replaced nor reduced, and that, at present, explanations provided by Classical Genetics for certain hereditary patterns (e.g. those mentioned in Sect. 2) are still considered valid.
The conclusion follows due to join action of all the premises; notice in particular the crucial role of (3) that implies that, given the dominance of the factors that determine yellow character, three of the four combinations of the two factors express the yellow character. The same applies to the following, less straightforward examples. As we will emphasize below, (3) specifies the particular parameters for transmission and determination of characters by factors for the case in point.
It is worth mentioning that the term ‘fundamental law’ is here used in a different sense from the classical one, i.e. as a true strict universally quantified conditional statement, see e.g. Hempel & Oppenheim (1948).
For a standard presentation of the structuralist criteria of T-theoreticity, see Balzer, Moulines & Sneed (1987). For a discussion of different criteria of theoreticity – either linguistic or model-theoretic –, a comparison of both ways of presentation of criteria – including the model-theoretic structuralist criteria of T-theoreticity –, and a proposal of definitions of theoreticity and pre-theoreticity, see Schurz (2014).
Actually, in the formulation we made of the premise (3) in the CG-explanations above (Sect. 2), although it is clear that such premise includes the specification of parameters (i), (ii) and (iii) of CGGP for (deriving) the explanandum in point, the nomological aspect is less transparent. Premises (3) as formulated above may not look like special “laws”, since they specify such parameters but without explicitly adding “and these are responsible of the phenotype data in point”. Nevertheless, it is clear that they have to be read as implicitly saying so, for (as we emphasized in fn. 4) from them (and the initial conditions stablished in the other premises) one can infer the phenotypic distribution. Since this implication is “general” (do not apply just to a single event but to a type of phenotypic explananda) and “counterfactual-supporting” (it has modal import), we think it has all the elements for considering it lawful (in the minimal sense mentioned above).
The embedding would take place ideally, in an exact way, but as many have emphasized this is in general unrealistic for there always are idealizations and approximations involved. We will not enter into this complication here. For a structuralist treatment of these features, see Balzer, Moulines & Sneed, 1987, Ch. VII.
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Research for this work has been supported by the National Agency of Scientific and Technological Promotion (PICT-2018-3454) (Argentina) and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (PID2020-115114GB-I00) (Spain). We want to thank two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Lorenzano, P., Díez, J. Scientific explanation as ampliative, specialized embedding: the case of classical genetics. Synthese 200, 510 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03983-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03983-6