Abstract
One of the central aims of science is explanation: scientists seek to uncover why things happen the way they do. This chapter addresses what kinds of explanations are formulated in biology, how explanatory aims influence other features of the field of biology, and the implications of all of this for biology education. Philosophical treatments of scientific explanation have been both complicated and enriched by attention to explanatory strategies in biology. Most basically, whereas traditional philosophy of science based explanation on derivation from scientific laws, there are many biological explanations in which laws play little or no role. Instead, the field of biology is a natural place to turn for support for the idea that causal information is explanatory. Biology has also been used to motivate mechanistic accounts of explanation, as well as criticisms of that approach. Ultimately, the most pressing issue about explanation in biology may be how to account for the wide range of explanatory styles encountered in the field. This issue is crucial, for the aims of biological explanation influence a variety of other features of the field of biology. Explanatory aims account for the continued neglect of some central causal factors, a neglect that would otherwise be mysterious. This is linked to the persistent use of models like evolutionary game theory and population genetic models, models that are simplified to the point of unreality. These explanatory aims also offer a way to interpret many biologists’ total commitment to one or another methodological approach, and the intense disagreements that result. In my view, such debates are better understood as arising not from different theoretical commitments, but commitments to different explanatory projects. Biology education would thus be enriched by attending to approaches to biological explanation, as well as the unexpected ways that these explanatory aims influence other features of biology. I suggest five lessons for teaching about explanation in biology that follow from the considerations of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
For the sake of simplicity, I use the word “phenomenon” throughout this chapter to stand in for various conceptions of the target of explanation: events or laws, propositions, explananda, etc. Such distinctions are not central to the aim of this chapter.
- 2.
A trait’s fitness is a measure of the trait’s relative contribution to organisms’ ability to survive and reproduce. However, the concept of fitness is vexed; see Rosenberg and Bouchard (2010) for an overview of the difficulties.
- 3.
Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate causes can be construed as a distinction between explanations of why members of a population have some trait (evolutionary/ultimate causes) and explanations of how members of the population came to have that trait (proximate/developmental causes). This proximate/ultimate distinction has received a good amount of attention in philosophy of biology. Ariew (2003) reinterprets the distinction as distinguishing between dynamical versus statistical explanations. Laland et al. (2011) argue that Mayr’s distinction fails because the types of causes distinguished are interrelated.
- 4.
This approach analyzes games for points of stability, e.g., evolutionary stable strategies (Maynard Smith and Price 1973). A different approach to evolutionary game theory instead specifies population dynamics, e.g., replicator dynamics, and thus results in dynamical models.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Francis Cartieri for assistance on this project. I also appreciate getting helpful feedback on earlier drafts from Francis Cartieri, Kostas Kampourakis, and an anonymous referee for this volume.
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Potochnik, A. (2013). Biological Explanation. 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_3
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