Abstract
So far in Part II I have been at pains to deal with aporia related to evolutionary biology’s commitment to the mind independence and irreducibility of biological individuals, and the claim that such individuals, and much besides, are subject to change. In the last chapter I also attempted to show that evolutionary biology’s self-imposed explanatory tasks could not be accomplished without accepting Aristotelian essentialism. The main idea has been to subject Scholastic principles to aporetic testing. What has emerged so far is the deep compatibility between evolutionary biology and the metaphysical principles of Aristotle and the Scholastics. This chapter develops these themes further by focusing on another issue arising from evolutionary biology’s claim to provide adequate explanations of both biological diversity and organismal design.
... the contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual. (Eddington, 1928, pp. 266–267)1
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Notes
For excellent discussions of both points see Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origins of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1942)
Paul Harvey and Mark Pagel’s The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Longmans, 1986, p. 73).
Theodosius Dobzhansky writes: ‘The variety of these possible ways of living — ecological niches is... great’. The Genetics of the Evolutionary Process (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 27).
McGhee, G. R., Theoretical Morphology: The Concept and its Applications (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 2).
This account of the intellectual division of labour is developed by E. J. Lowe in The Possibility of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
McGhee, G. R. Theoretical Morphology: The Concept and Its Applications (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 2).
See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
See Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
See Gideon Rosen, ‘Modal Fictionalism’, Mind, 99, 1990: 327–354.
Stephen Yablo, ‘Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?’ Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, 53, 1993: 1–42.
Williamson, Timothy, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, p. 163).
See chapter 3 of Robert Nozick’s Invariances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
For an introduction to some of the issues relating to the metaphysics of powers see Michael Esfeld’s ‘Humean Metaphysics vs a Metaphysics of Powers’ in Time, Change and Reduction: Philosophical Aspects of Statistical Mechanics, in Ernst and Hütteman (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 119–135).
See also Rejane Bernier, ‘The Species as Individual: Facing Essentialism’, Systematic Zoology, 33(4), 1984: 460–469
Dennis Walsh, ‘Evolutionary Essentialism’, Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 57, 2006: 425–448
Michael Devitt, ‘Resurrecting Biological Essentialism’, Philosophy of Science, 75, 2008: 344–382.
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© 2013 Stephen Boulter
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Boulter, S. (2013). Evolutionary Biology, Modality and Explanation. In: Metaphysics from a Biological Point of View. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322821_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322821_7
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