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Biology and Philosophy

, Volume 21, Issue 4, pp 471–499 | Cite as

Parts and Theories in Compositional Biology

  • Rasmus Grønfeldt WintherEmail author
Article
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Abstract

I analyze the importance of parts in the style of biological theorizing that I call compositional biology. I do this by investigating various aspects, including partitioning frames and explanatory accounts, of the theoretical perspectives that fall under and are guided by compositional biology. I ground this general examination in a comparative analysis of three different disciplines with their associated compositional theoretical perspectives: comparative morphology, functional morphology, and developmental biology. I glean data for this analysis from canonical textbooks and defend the use of such texts for the philosophy of science. I end with a discussion of the importance of recognizing formal and compositional biology as two genuinely different ways of doing biology – the differences arising more from their distinct methodologies than from scientific discipline included or natural domain studied. Ultimately, developing a translation manual between the two styles would be desirable as they currently are, at times, in conflict.

Keywords

Compositional biology Developmental biology Morphology Parts Science textbook Style of theorizing Theoretical perspective 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Melinda Fagan, James Griesemer, Paul Griffiths, Elisabeth Lloyd, Frederick Schmitt, Kim Sterelny, Michael Wade, and an anonymous reviewer for carefully commenting on the manuscript. I thank Vivette García Deister, Elihu Gerson, Daniel McShea, Amir Najmi, Sergio Martínez, Susan Oyama, Rudolf Raff, David Wake, and Michael Weisberg for conversations on these topics. I am grateful to Springer Science and Business Media (Figure 1), Harvard University Press (Figures 3–5), and Sinauer Associates Inc. (Figure 6) for granting me permission to reproduce original material.

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© Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Instituto de Investigaciones FilosóficasUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Circuito Mario de la Cueva, Ciudad Universitaria, CoyoacánMéxico D.F.México

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