Topics in the philosophy of biology

Natural selection

Without doubt, the chief event in the history of evolutionary theory was the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (1809–82). Arguing for the truth of evolutionary theory may be conceived as involving three tasks: namely, establishing the fact of evolution—showing that it is reasonable to accept a naturalistic, or law-bound, developmental account of life’s origins; identifying, for various different species, the particular path, or phylogeny, through which each evolved; and ascertaining a cause or mechanism of evolutionary change. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin accomplished the first and the third of these tasks (he seemed, in this and subsequent works, not to be much interested in the second). His proposal for the mechanism of evolutionary change was natural selection, popularly known as “survival of the fittest.” Selection comes about through random and naturally occurring variation in the physical features of organisms and through the ongoing competition within and between species for limited supplies of food and space. Variations that tend to benefit an individual (or a species) in the struggle for existence are preserved and passed on (“selected”), because the individuals (or species) that have them tend to survive.

The notion of natural selection was controversial in Darwin’s time, and it remains so today. The major early objection was that the term is inappropriate: if Darwin’s basic point is that evolutionary change takes place naturally, without divine intervention, why should he use a term that implies a conscious choice or decision on the part of an intelligent being? Darwin’s response was that the term natural selection is simply a metaphor, no different in kind from the metaphors used in every other branch of science. Some contemporary critics, however, have objected that, even treated as a metaphor, “natural selection” is misleading. One form of this objection comes from philosophers who dislike the use of any metaphor in science—because, they allege, metaphorical description in some sense conceals what is objectively there—while another comes from philosophers who merely dislike the use of this particular metaphor.

The Darwinian response to the first form of the objection is that metaphors in science are useful and appropriate because of their heuristic role. In the case of “natural selection,” the metaphor points toward, and leads one to ask questions about, features that have adaptive value—that increase the chances that the individual (or species) will survive; in particular it draws attention to how the adaptive value of the feature lies in the particular function it performs.

The second form of the objection is that the metaphor inclines one to see function and purpose where none in fact exist. The Darwinian response in this case is to acknowledge that there are indeed examples in nature of features that have no function or of features that are not optimally adapted to serve the function they apparently have. Nevertheless, it is not a necessary assumption of evolutionary theory that every feature of every organism is adapted to some purpose, much less optimally adapted. As an investigative strategy, however, the assumption of function and purpose is useful, because it can help one to discover adaptive features that are subtle or complex or for some other reason easy to overlook. As Kuhn insisted, the benefit of good intellectual paradigms is that they encourage one to keep working to solve puzzles even when no solution is in sight. The best strategy, therefore, is to assume the existence of function and purpose until one is finally forced to conclude that none exists. It is a bigger intellectual sin to give up looking too early than to continue looking too long.

Although the theory of evolution by natural selection was first published by Darwin, it was first proposed by Darwin’s colleague, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). At Wallace’s urging, later editions of On the Origin of Species used a term coined by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), survival of the fittest, in place of natural selection. This substitution, unfortunately, led to countless (and continuing) debates about whether the thesis of natural selection is a substantive claim about the real world or simply a tautology (a statement, such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” that is true by virtue of its form or the meaning of its terms). If the thesis of natural selection is equivalent to the claim that those that survive are the fittest, and if the fittest are identified as those that survive, then the thesis of natural selection is equivalent to the claim that those that survive are those that survive—true indeed, but hardly an observation worthy of science.

Defenders of Darwin have issued two main responses to this charge. The first, which is more technically philosophical, is that, if one favours the semantic view of theories, then all theories are made of models that are in themselves a priori—that is, not as such claims about the real world but rather idealized pictures of it. To fault selection claims on these grounds is therefore unfair, because, in a sense, all scientific claims start in this way. It is only when one begins to apply models, seeing if they are true of reality, that empirical claims come into play. There is no reason why this should be less true of selection claims than of any other scientific claims. One could claim that camouflage is an important adaptation, but it is another matter actually to claim (and then to show) that dark animals against a dark background do better than animals of another colour.

The second response to the tautology objection, which is more robustly scientific, is that no Darwinian has ever claimed that the fittest always survive; there are far too many random events in the world for such a claim to be true. However fit an organism may be, it can always be struck down by lightning or disease or any kind of accident. Or it may simply fail to find a mate, ensuring that whatever adaptive feature it possesses will not be passed on to its progeny. Indeed, work by the American population geneticist Sewall Wright (1889–1989) has shown that, in small populations, the less fit might be more successful than the more fit, even to the extent of replacing the more fit entirely, owing to random but relatively significant changes in the gene pool, a phenomenon known as genetic drift.

What the thesis of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, really claims, according to Darwinians, is not that the fittest always survive but that, on average, the more fit (or the fittest) are more successful in survival and reproduction than the less fit (or unfit). Another way of putting this is to say that the fit have a greater propensity toward successful survival and reproduction than the less fit.

Undoubtedly part of the problem with the thesis of natural selection is that it seems to rely on an inductive generalization regarding the regularity of nature (see induction). Natural selection can serve as a mechanism of evolutionary change, in other words, only on the assumption that a feature that has adaptive value to an individual in a given environment—and is consequently passed on—also will have value to other individuals in similar environments. This assumption is apparently one of the reasons why philosophers who are skeptical of inductive reasoning—as was Popper—tend not to feel truly comfortable with the thesis of natural selection. Setting aside the general problem of induction, however, one may ask whether the particular assumption on which the thesis of natural selection relies is rationally justified. Some philosophers and scientists, such as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, think not only that it is justified but that a much stronger claim also is warranted: namely, that wherever life occurs—on this planet or any other—natural selection will occur and will act as the main force of evolutionary change. In Dawkins’s view, natural selection is a natural law.

Other philosophers and scientists, however, are doubtful that there can be any laws in biology, even assuming there are laws in other areas of science. Although they do not reject inductive inference per se, they believe that generalizations in biology must be hedged with so many qualifications that they cannot have the necessary force one thinks of as characteristic of genuine natural laws. (For example, the initially plausible generalization that all mammals give birth to live young must be qualified to take into account the platypus.) An intermediate position is taken by those who recognize the existence of laws in biology but deny that natural selection itself is such a law. Darwin certainly thought of natural selection as a law, very much like Newton’s law of gravitational attraction; indeed, he believed that selection is a force that applies to all organisms, just as gravity is a force that applies to all physical objects. Critics, however, point out that there does not seem to be any single phenomenon that could be identified as a “force” of selection. If one were to look for such a force, all one would actually see are individual organisms living and reproducing and dying. At best, therefore, selection is a kind of shorthand for a host of other processes, which themselves may or may not be governed by natural laws.

In response, defenders of selection charge that these critics are unduly reductionistic. In many other areas of science, they argue, it is permissible to talk of certain phenomena as if they were discrete entities, even though the terms involved are really nothing more than convenient ways of referring, at a certain level of generality, to complex patterns of objects or events. If one were to look for the pressure of a gas, for example, all one would actually see are individual molecules colliding with each other and with the walls of their container. But no one would conclude from this that there is no such thing as pressure. Likewise, the fact that there is nothing to see beyond individual organisms living and reproducing and dying does not show that there is no such thing as selection.

Levels of selection

Darwin held that natural selection operates at the level of the individual. Adaptive features are acquired by and passed on to individual organisms, not groups or species, and they benefit individual organisms directly and groups or species only incidentally. One type of case, however, did cause him worry: in nests of social insects, there are always some members (the sterile workers) who devote their lives entirely to the well-being of others. How could a feature for self-sacrifice be explained, if adaptive features are by definition beneficial to the individual rather than to the group? Eventually Darwin decided that the nest as a whole could be treated as a kind of superorganism, with the individual members as parts; hence the individual benefiting from adaptation is the nest rather than any particular insect.

Wallace differed from Darwin on this question, arguing that selection sometimes operates at the level of groups and hence that there can be adaptive features that benefit the group at the expense of the individual. When two groups come into conflict, members of each group will develop features that help them to benefit other group members at their own expense (i.e., they become altruists). When one group succeeds and the other fails, the features for altruism developed in that group are selected and passed on. For the most part Darwin resisted this kind of thinking, though he made a limited exception for one kind of human behaviour, allowing that morality, or ethics, could be the result of group selection rather than individual selection. But even in this case he was inclined to think that benefits at the level of individuals might actually be more important, since some kinds of altruistic behaviour (such as grooming) tend to be reciprocated.

Several evolutionary theorists after Darwin took for granted that group selection is real and indeed quite important, especially in the evolution of social behaviour. Konrad Lorenz (1903–89), the founder of modern ethology, and his followers made this assumption the basis of their theorizing. A minority of more-conservative Darwinians, meanwhile—notably Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962) and J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964)—resisted such arguments. In the 1960s, the issue came to a fore, and for a while group selection was dismissed entirely. Some theorists, notably the American evolutionary biologist George C. Williams, argued that individual interests would always outweigh group interests, since genes associated with selfish behaviour would inevitably spread at the expense of genes associated with altruism. Other researchers showed how apparent examples of group selection could be explained in individualistic terms. Most notably, the British evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton (1936–2000) showed how social behaviour in insects can be explained as a form of “kin selection” beneficial to individual interests. In related work, Hamilton’s colleague John Maynard Smith (1920–2004) employed the insights of game theory to explain much social interaction from the perspective of individual selection.

Throughout these debates, however, no one denied the possibility or even the actuality of group selection—the issue was rather its extent and importance. Fisher, for example, always supposed that reproduction through sex must be explained in such a fashion. (Sexual reproduction benefits the group because it enables valuable features to spread rapidly, but it generally benefits the individual mother little or not at all.) In the 1970s, the group-selection perspective enjoyed a resurgence, as new models were devised to show that many situations formerly understood solely in terms of individual interests could be explained in terms of group interests as well. The American entomologist Edward O. Wilson, later recognized as one of the founders of sociobiology, argued that ants of the genus Pheidole are so dependent upon one another for survival that Darwin’s original suggestion about them was correct: the nest is a superorganism, an individual in its own right. Others argued that only a group-selection perspective is capable of explaining certain kinds of behaviour, especially human moral behaviour. This was the position of the American biologist David S. Wilson (no relation to Edward O. Wilson) and the American philosopher Elliott Sober.

In some respects the participants in these debates have been talking past each other. Should a pair of organisms competing for food or space be regarded as two individuals struggling against each other or as a group exhibiting internal conflict? Depending on the perspective one takes, such situations can be seen as examples of either individual or group selection. A somewhat more significant issue arose when some evolutionary theorists in the early 1970s began to argue that the level at which selection truly takes place is that of the gene. The “genic selection” approach was initially rejected by many as excessively reductionistic. This hostility was partly based on misunderstanding, which is now largely removed thanks to the efforts of some scholars to clarify what genic selection can mean. What it cannot mean—or, at least, what it can only rarely mean—is that genes compete against each other directly. Only organisms engage in direct competition. Genes can play only the indirect role of encoding and transmitting the adaptive features that organisms need to compete successfully. Genic selection therefore amounts to a kind of counting, or ledger keeping, insofar as it results in a record of the relative successes and failures of different kinds of genes. In contrast, “organismic selection,” as it may be called, refers to the successes and failures at the level of the organism. Both genic and organismic selection are instances of individual selection, but the former refers to the “replicators”—the carriers of heredity—and the latter to the “vehicles”—the entities in which the replicators are packaged.

Could there be levels of selection even higher than the group? Could there be “species selection”? This was the view of the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), who argued that selection at the level of species is very important in macro-evolution—i.e., the evolution of organisms over very long periods of time (millions of years). It is important to understand that Gould’s thesis was not simply that there are cases in which the members of a successful species possess a feature that the members of a failed species do not and that possession of the feature makes the difference between success and failure. Rather, he claimed that species can produce emergent features—features that belong to the species as a whole rather than to individual members—and that these features themselves can be selected for.

One example of such a feature is reproductive isolation, a relation between two or more groups of organisms that obtains when they cannot interbreed (e.g., human beings and all other primates). Gould argued that reproductive isolation could have important evolutionary consequences, insofar as it delimits the range of features (adaptive or otherwise) that members of a given species may acquire. Suppose the members of one species are more likely to wander around the area in which they live than are members of another species. The first species could be more prone to break up and speciate than the second species. This in turn might led to greater variation overall in the descendants of the first species than in the descendants of the second, and so forth. Critics responded that, even if this is possibly so, the ultimate variation seems not to have come about because it was useful to anyone but rather as an accidental by-product of the speciation process—a by-product of wandering. To this Gould replied that perhaps species selection does not in itself promote adaptation at any level, even the highest. Naturally, to conventional Darwinians this was so unsatisfactory a response that they were inclined to withhold the term “selection” to the whole process, whether or not it could be said to exist and to be significant.

Testing

One of the oldest objections to the thesis of natural selection is that it is untestable. Even some of Darwin’s early supporters, such as the British biologist T.H. Huxley (1825–95), expressed doubts on this score. A modern form of the objection was raised in the early 1960s by the British historian of science Martin Rudwick, who claimed that the thesis is uncomfortably asymmetrical. Although it can be tested positively, since features found to have adaptive value count in its favour, it cannot really be tested negatively, since features found not to have adaptive value tend to be dismissed as not fully understood or as indicative of the need for further work. Too often and too easily, according to the objection, supporters of natural selection simply claim that, in the fullness of time, apparent counterexamples will actually prove to support their thesis, or at least not to undermine it.

Naturally enough, this objection attracted the sympathetic attention of Popper, who had proposed a principle of “falsifiability” as a test of whether a given hypothesis is genuinely empirical (and therefore scientific). According to Popper, it is the mark of a pseudoscience that its hypotheses are not open to falsification by any conceivable test. He concluded on this basis that evolutionary theory is not a genuine science but merely a “metaphysical research programme.”

Supporters of natural selection responded, with some justification, that it is simply not true that no counterevidence is possible. They acknowledged that some features are obviously not adaptive in some respects: in human beings, for example, walking upright causes chronic pain in the lower back, and the size of the infant’s head relative to that of the birth canal causes great pain for females giving birth.

Nevertheless, the fact is that evolutionary theorists must often be content with less than fully convincing evidence when attempting to establish what the adaptive value—if any—of a particular feature may be. Ideally, investigations of this sort would trace phylogenies and check genetic data to establish certain preliminary adaptive hypotheses, then test the hypotheses in nature and in laboratory experiments. In many cases, however, only a few avenues of testing will be available to researchers. Studies of dinosaurs, for example, cannot rely to any significant extent upon genetic evidence, and the scope for experiment is likewise very limited and necessarily indirect. A defect that is liable to appear in any investigation in which the physical evidence available is limited to the structure of the feature in question—perhaps in the form of fossilized bones—is the circular use of structural evidence to establish a particular adaptive hypothesis that one has already decided is plausible; other possible adaptations, just as consistent with the limited evidence available, are ignored. Although in these cases a certain amount of inference in reverse—in which one begins with a hypothesis that seems plausible and sees whether the evidence supports it—is legitimate and even necessary, some critics, including the American morphologist George Lauder, have contended that the pitfalls of such reasoning have been insufficiently appreciated by evolutionary theorists.

Various methods have been employed to improve the soundness of tests used to evaluate adaptive hypotheses. The “comparative method,” which involves considering evidence drawn from a wide range of similar organisms, was used in a study of the relatively large size of the testicles of chimpanzees as compared to those of gorillas. The adaptive hypothesis was that, given that the average female chimpanzee has several male sexual partners, a large sperm production, and therefore large testicles, would be an adaptive advantage for an individual male competing with other males to reproduce. The hypothesis was tested by comparing the sexual habits of chimpanzees with those of gorillas and other primates: if testicle size was not correlated with the average number of male sexual partners in the right way, the hypothesis would be disproved. In fact, however, the study found that the hypothesis was well supported by the evidence.

A much more controversial method is the use of so-called “optimality models.” The researcher begins by assuming that natural selection works optimally, in the sense that the feature (or set of features) eventually selected represents the best adaptation for performing the function in question. For any given function, then, the researcher checks to see whether the feature (or set of features) is indeed the best adaptation possible. If it is, then “optimal adaptation” is partially confirmed; if it is not, then either optimal adaptation is partially disconfirmed, or the function being performed has been misunderstood, or the background assumptions are faulty.

Not surprisingly, some critics have objected that optimality models are just another example of the near-circular reasoning that has characterized evolutionary theorizing from the beginning. Whether this is true or not, of course, depends on what one takes the studies involving optimality models to prove. John Maynard Smith, for one, denies that they constitute proof of optimal adaptation per se. Rather, optimal adaptation is assumed as something like a heuristic, and the researcher then goes on to try to uncover particular adaptations at work in particular situations. This way of proceeding does not preclude the possibility that particular adaptive hypotheses will turn out to be false. Other researchers, however, argue that the use of optimality models does constitute a test of optimal adaptation; hence, the presence of disconfirming evidence must be taken as proof that optimal adaptation is incorrect.

As most researchers use them, however, optimality models seem to be neither purely heuristic nor purely empirical. They are used as something like a background assumption, but their details are open to revision if they prove inconsistent with empirical evidence. Thus their careful use does not constitute circular reasoning but a kind of feedback, in which one makes adjustments in the premises of the argument as new evidence warrants, the revised premises then indicating the kind of additional evidence one needs to look for. This kind of reasoning is complicated and difficult, but it is not fallacious.

Molecular biology

A major topic in many fields of philosophy, but especially in the philosophy of science, is reductionism. There are at least three distinct kinds of reductionism: ontological, methodological, and theoretical. Ontological reductionism is the metaphysical doctrine that entities of a certain kind are in reality collections or combinations of entities of a simpler or more basic kind. The pre-Socratic doctrine that the physical world is ultimately composed of different combinations of a few basic elements—e.g., earth, air, fire, and water—is an example of ontological reductionism. Methodological reductionism is the closely related view that the behaviour of entities of a certain kind can be explained in terms of the behaviour or properties of entities of another (usually physically smaller) kind. Finally, theoretical reductionism is the view in the philosophy of science that the entities and laws posited in older scientific theories can be logically derived from newer scientific theories, which are therefore in some sense more basic.

Since the decline of vitalism, which posited a special nonmaterial life force, ontological reductionism has been nearly universally accepted by philosophers and scientists, though a small number have advocated some form of mind-body dualism, among them Karl Popper and the Australian physiologist and Nobel laureate John Eccles (1903–97). Methodological reductionism also has been universally accepted since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and in the 20th century its triumphs were outstanding, particularly in molecular biology.

The logical positivists of the 20th century advocated a thorough-going form of theoretical reductionism according to which entire fields of physical science are reducible, in principle, to other fields, in particular to physics. The classic example of theoretical reduction was understood to be the derivation of Newtonian mechanics from Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. The relationship between the classic theory of genetics proposed by Gregor Mendel (1822–84) and modern molecular genetics also seemed to be a paradigmatic case of theoretical reduction. In the older theory, laws of segregation and independent assortment, among others, were used to explain macroscopic physical characteristics like size, shape, and colour. These laws were derived from the laws of the newer theory, which governed the formation of genes and chromosomes from molecules of DNA and RNA, by means of “bridge principles” that identified entities in the older theory with entities (or combinations of entities) in the newer one, in particular the Mendelian unit of heredity with certain kinds of DNA molecule. By being reduced in this way, Mendelian genetics was not replaced by molecular genetics but rather absorbed by it.

In the 1960s, the reductionist program of the logical positivists came under attack by Thomas Kuhn and his followers, who argued that, in the history of science, the adoption of new “paradigms,” or scientific worldviews, generally results in the complete replacement rather than the reduction of older theories. Kuhn specifically denied that Newtonian mechanics had been reduced by relativity. Philosophers of biology, meanwhile, advanced similar criticisms of the purported reduction of Mendelian genetics by molecular genetics. It was pointed out, for example, that in many respects the newer theory simply contradicted the older one and that, for various reasons, the Mendelian gene could not be identified with the DNA molecule. (One reason was that Mendel’s gene was supposed to be indivisible, whereas the DNA molecule can be broken at any point along its length, and in fact molecular genetics assumes that such breaking takes place.) Some defenders of reductionism responded to this criticism by claiming that the actual object of reduction is not the older theory of historical fact but a hypothetical theory that takes into account the newer theory’s strengths—something the Hungarian-born British philosopher Imré Lakatos (1922–74) called a “rational reconstruction.”

Philosophical criticism of genetic reductionism persisted, however, culminating in the 1980s in a devastating critique by the Australian philosopher Philip Kitcher, who denied the possibility, in practice and in principle, of any theoretical reduction of the sort envisioned by the logical positivists. In particular, no scientific theory is formalized as a hypothetico-deductive system as the positivists had contended, and there are no genuine “bridge principles” linking entities of older theories to entities of newer ones. The reality is that bits and pieces of newer theories are used to explain, extend, correct, or supplement bits and pieces of older ones. Modern genetics, he pointed out, uses molecular concepts but also original Mendelian ones; for example, molecular concepts are used to explain, not to replace, the Mendelian notion of mutation. The straightfoward logical derivation of older theories from newer ones is simply a misconception.

Reductionism continues to be defended by some philosophers, however. Kitcher’s former student Kenneth Waters, for example, argues that the notion of reduction can be a source of valuable insight into the relationships between successive scientific theories. Moreover, critics of reductionism, he contends, have focused on the wrong theories. Although strict Mendelian genetics is not easily reduced by the early molecular genetics of the 1950s, the much richer classical theory of the gene, as developed by the American Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) and others in the 1910s, comes close to being reducible by the sophisticated molecular genetics of recent decades; the connections between the latter two theories are smoothly derivative in a way that would have pleased the logical positivists. The ideal of a complete reduction of one science by another is out of reach, but reduction on a smaller scale is possible in many instances.

At least part of this controversy arises from the contrasting visions of descriptivists and prescriptivists in the philosophy of science. No one on either side of the debate would deny that theoretical reduction in a pure form has never occurred and never will. On the other hand, the ideal of theoretical reduction can be a useful perspective from which to view the development of scientific theories over time, yielding insights into their origins and relationships that might otherwise not be apparent. Many philosophers and scientists find this perspective attractive and satisfying, even as they acknowledge that it fails to describe scientific theories as they really are.

Form and function

Evolutionary biology is faced with two major explanatory problems: form and function. How is it possible to account for the forms of organisms and their parts and in particular for the structural similarities between organisms? How is it possible to account for the ways in which the forms of organisms and their parts seem to be adapted to certain functions? These topics are much older than evolutionary theory itself, having preoccupied Aristotle and all subsequent biologists. The French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), regarded as the father of modern comparative anatomy, believed that function is more basic than form; form emerges as a consequence of function. His great rival, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), was enthused by form and downplayed function. Darwin, of course, was always more interested in function, and his thesis of natural selection was explicitly directed at the problem of explaining functional adaptation. Although he was certainly not unaware of the problem of form—what he called the “unity of type”—like Cuvier he thought that form was a consequence of function and not something requiring explanation in its own right.

One of the traditional tools for studying form is embryology, since early stages of embryonic development can reveal aspects of form, as well as structural relationships with other organisms, that later growth conceals. As a scientist Darwin was in fact interested in embryology, though it did not figure prominently in the argument for evolution presented in On the Origin of Species. Subsequent researchers were much more concerned with form and particularly with embryology as a means of identifying phylogenetic histories and relationships. But with the incorporation of Mendelian and then molecular genetics into the theory of evolution starting in the early 20th century, resulting in what has come to be known as the “synthetic theory,” function again became preeminent, and interest in form and embryology declined.

In recent years the pendulum has begun to swing once again in the other direction. There is now a vital and flourishing school of evolutionary development, often referred to as “evo-devo,” and along with it a resurgence of interest in form over function. Many researchers in evo-devo argue that nature imposes certain general constraints on the ways in which organisms may develop, and therefore natural selection, the means by which function determines form, does not have a free hand. The history of evolutionary development reflects these limitations.

There are various levels at which constraints might operate, of course, and at certain levels the existence of constraints of one kind or another is not disputed. No one would deny, for example, that natural selection must be constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry. Since the volume (and hence weight) of an animal increases by the cube of its length, it is physically impossible for an elephant to be as agile as a cat, no matter how great an adaptive advantage such agility might provide. It is also universally agreed that selection is necessarily constrained by the laws of genetics.

The more contentious cases arise in connection with apparent constraints on more specific kinds of functional adaptation. In a celebrated article with Richard Lewontin, Gould argued that structural constraints on the adaptation of certain features inevitably result in functionally insignificant by-products, which he compared to the spandrels in medieval churches—the roughly triangular areas above and on either side of an arch. Biological spandrels, such as the pseudo-penis of the female hyena, are the necessary result of certain adaptations but serve no useful purpose themselves. Once in the population, however, they persist and are passed on, often becoming nearly universal patterns or archetypes, what Gould referred to as Baupläne (German: “body plans”).

According to Gould, other constraints operating at the molecular level represent deeply rooted similarities between animals that themselves may be as distant from each other as human beings and fruit flies. Humans have in common with fruit flies certain sequences of DNA, known as “homeoboxes,” that control the development and growth of bodily parts—determining, for example, where limbs will grow in the embryo. The fact that homeoboxes apparently operate independently of selection (since they have persisted unchanged for hundreds of millions of years) indicates that, to an important extent, form is independent of function.

These arguments have been rejected by more-traditional Darwinists, such as John Maynard Smith and George C. Williams. It is not surprising, they insist, that many features of organisms have no obvious function, and in any case one must not assume too quickly that any apparent Bauplän is completely nonfunctional. Even if it has no function now, it may have had one in the past. A classic example of a supposedly nonadaptive Bauplän is the four-limbedness of vertebrates. Why do humans have four limbs rather than six, like insects? Maynard Smith and Williams agree that four-limbedness serves no purpose now. But when vertebrates were aquatic creatures, two limbs fore and two limbs hind was of great value for moving upward and downward in water. The same point applies at the molecular level. If homeoboxes did not work as well as they do, selection would soon have begun tampering with them. The fact that something does not change does not mean that it is not functional or that it is immune to selective pressure. Indeed, there is evidence that, in some cases and as the need arises, even the most basic and most long-lived of molecular strands can change quite rapidly, in evolutionary terms.

The Scottish morphologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860–1948) advocated a form of antifunctionalism even more radical than Gould’s, arguing that adaptation was often incorrectly attributed to certain features of organisms only because evolutionary theorists were ignorant of the relevant physics or mathematics. The dangling form of the jellyfish, for example, is not adaptive in itself but is simply the result of placing a relatively dense but amorphous substance in water. Likewise, the spiral pattern, or phyllotaxis, exhibited by pine cones or by the petals of a sunflower is simply the result of the mathematical properties of lattices. More-recent thinkers in this tradition, notably Stuart Kauffman in the United States and Brian Goodwin in Britain, argue that a very great deal of organic nature is simply the expression of form and is only incidentally functional.

Defenders of function have responded to this criticism by claiming that it raises a false opposition. They naturally agree that physics and mathematics are important but insist that they are only part of the picture, since they cannot account for everything the evolutionary theorist is interested in. The fact that the form of the jellyfish is the result of the physics of fluids does not show that the form itself is not an adaptation—the dense and amorphous properties of the jellyfish could have been selected precisely because, in water, they result in a form that has adaptive value. Likewise for the shapes of pinecones and sunflower petals. The issue, therefore, is whether natural selection can take advantage of those physical properties of features that are specially determined by physics and mathematics. Even if there are some cases in which “order is for free,” as the antifunctionalists like to claim, there is no reason why selection cannot make use of it in one way or another. Jellyfish and sunflowers, after all, are both very well adapted to their environments.

Teleology

A distinctive characteristic of the biological sciences, especially evolutionary theory, is their reliance on teleological language, or language expressive of a plan, purpose, function, goal, or end, as in: “The purpose of the plates on the spine of the Stegosaurus was to control body temperature.” In contrast, one does not find such language in the physical sciences. Astronomers do not ask, for example, what purpose or function the Moon serves (though many a wag has suggested that it was designed to light the way home for drunken philosophers). Why does biology have such language? Is it undesirable, a mark of the weakness of the life sciences? Can it be eliminated?

As noted above, Aristotle provided a metaphysical justification of teleological language in biology by introducing the notion of final causality, in which reference to what will exist in the future is used to explain what exists or is occurring now. The great Christian philosophers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, especially Augustine (354–430) and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74), took the existence of final causality in the natural world to be indicative of its design by God. The eye serves the end of sight because God, in his infinite wisdom, understood that animals, human beings especially, would be better off with sight than without it. This perspective was commonplace among all educated people—not only philosophers, theologians, and scientists—until the middle of the 19th century and the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Although Darwin himself was not an atheist (he was probably sympathetic to deism, believing in an impersonal god who created the world but did not intervene in it), he did wish to remove religion and theology from biology. One might expect, therefore, that the dissemination and acceptance of the theory of evolution would have had the effect of removing teleological language from the biological sciences. But in fact the opposite occurred: one can ask just as sensibly of a Darwinian as of a Thomist what end the eye serves.

In the first half of the 20th century many philosophers and scientists, convinced that teleological explanations were inherently unscientific, made attempts to eliminate the notion of teleology from the biological sciences, or at least to interpret references to it in scientifically more acceptable terms. After World War II, intrigued by the example of weapons, such as torpedoes, that could be programmed to track their targets, some logical positivists suggested that teleology as it applies to biological systems is simply a matter of being “directively organized,” or “goal-directed,” in roughly the same way as a torpedo. (It is important to note that this sense of goal-directedness means not just being directed toward a goal but also having the capacity to respond appropriately to potentially disruptive change.) Biological organisms, according to this view, are natural goal-directed objects. But this fact is not really very remarkable or mysterious, since all it means is that organisms are natural examples of a system of a certain well-known kind.

However, as pointed out by the embryologist C.H. Waddington (1905–75), the biological notion of teleology seems not to be fully captured by this comparison, since the “adaptability” implied by goal-directedness is not the same as the “adaptation” or “adaptedness” evident in nature. The eye is not able to respond to change in the same way, or to the same extent, as a target-seeking torpedo; still, the structure of the eye is adapted to the end of sight. Adaptedness in this sense seems to be possible only as a result of natural selection, and the goal-directedness of the torpedo has nothing to do with that. Despite such difficulties, philosophers in the 1960s and ’70s continued to pursue interpretations of biological teleology that were essentially unrelated to selection. Two of the most important such efforts were the “capacity” approach and the “etiological” approach, developed by the American philosophers Robert Cummins and Larry Wright, respectively.

According to Cummins, a teleological system can be understood as one that has the capacity to do certain things, such as generate electricity or maintain body temperature (or ultimately life). The parts of the system can be thought of as being functional or purposeful in the sense that they contribute toward, or enable, the achievement of the system’s capacity or capacities. Although many scientists have agreed that Cummins has correctly described the main task of morphology—to identify the individual functions or purposes of the parts of biological systems—his view does not seem to explicate teleology in the biological sense, since it does not treat purposefulness as adaptedness, as something that results from a process of selection. (It should be noted that Cummins probably would not regard this point as a criticism, since he considers his analysis to be aimed at a somewhat more general notion of teleology.)

The etiological approach, though developed in the 1970s, was in fact precisely the same as the view propounded by Kant in his Critique of Judgment (1790). In this case, teleology amounts to the existence of causal relations in which the effect explains or is responsible for the cause. The serrated edge of a knife causes the bread to be cut, and at the same time the cutting of the bread is the reason for the fact that the edge of the knife is serrated. The eye produces vision, and at the same time vision is the reason for the existence of the eye. In the latter case, vision explains the existence of the eye because organisms with vision—through eyes or proto-eyes—do better in the struggle for survival than organisms without it; hence vision enables the creation of newer generations of organisms with eyes or proto-eyes.

There is one other important component of the etiological approach. In a causal relation that is truly purposeful, the effect must be in some sense good or desired. A storm may cause a lake to fill, and in some sense the filling of the lake may be responsible for the storm (through the evaporation of the water it contains), but one would not want to say that the purpose of the storm is to fill the lake. As Plato noted in his dialogue the Phaedo, purpose is appropriate only in cases in which the end is good.

The etiological approach interprets the teleological language of biology in much the same way Kant did—i.e., as essentially metaphorical. The existence of a kind of purposefulness in the eye does not license one to talk of the eye’s designer, as the purposefulness of a serrated edge allows one to talk of the designer of a knife. (Kant rejected the teleological argument for the existence of God, also known as the argument from design.) But it does allow one to talk of the eye as if it were, like the knife, the result of design. Teleological language, understood metaphorically, is therefore appropriate to describe parts of biological organisms that characteristically seem as if they were designed with the good of the organism in mind, though they were not actually designed at all.

Although it is possible to make sense of teleological language in biology, some philosophers still think that the science would be better off without it. Most, however, believe that attempting to eliminate it altogether would be going too far. In part their caution is influenced by recent philosophy of science, which has emphasized the important role that language, and particularly metaphor, has played in the construction and interpretation of scientific theories. In addition, there is a widespread view in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind that human thinking is essentially and inevitably metaphorical. Most importantly, however, many philosophers and scientists continue to emphasize the important heuristic role that the notion of teleology plays in biological theorizing. By treating biological organisms teleologically, one can discover a great deal about them that otherwise would be hidden from view. If no one had asked what purpose the plates of the Stegosaurus serve, no one would have discovered that they do indeed regulate the animal’s body temperature. And here lies the fundamental difference between the biological and the physical sciences: the former, but not the latter, studies things in nature that appear to be designed. This is not a sign of the inferiority of biology, however, but only a consequence of the way the world is. Biology and physics are different, and so are men and women. The French have a phrase to celebrate this fact.

The species problem

One of the oldest problems in philosophy is that of universals. The world seems to be broken up into different kinds of things. But what are these kinds, assuming they are distinct from the things that belong to them? Historically, some philosophers, known as realists, have held that kinds are real, whether they inhere in the individuals to which they belong (as Aristotle argued) or are independent of physical reality altogether (as Plato argued; see form). Other philosophers, known as nonrealists but often referred to as nominalists, after the medieval school (nominalism), held that there is nothing in reality over and above particular things. Terms for universals, therefore, are just names. Neither position, in its pure form, seems entirely satisfactory: if universals are real, where are they, and how does one know they exist? If they are just names, without any connection to reality, how do people know how to apply them, and why, nevertheless, do people apply them in the same way?

In the 18th century the philosophical debate regarding universals began to be informed by advances in the biological sciences, particularly the European discovery of huge numbers of new plant and animal species in voyages of exploration and colonization to other parts of the world. At first, from a purely scientific perspective, the new natural kinds indicated the need for a system of classification capable of making sense of the great diversity of living things, a system duly supplied by the great Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78). In the early 19th century Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) proposed a system that featured the separate classification of vertebrates and invertebrates. Cuvier went farther, arguing for four divisions, or embranchements, in the animal world: vertebrates, mollusks, articulates (arthropods), and radiates (animals with radial symmetry). All agreed, however, that there is one unit of classification that seems more fundamental or real than any other: the species. If species are real features of nature and not merely artefacts of human classifiers, then the question arises how they came into being. The only possible naturalistic answer—that they evolved over millions of years from more-primitive forms—leads immediately to a severe difficulty: how is it possible to define the species to which a given animal belongs in such a way that it does not include every evolutionary ancestor the animal had but at the same time is not arbitrary? At what point in the animal’s evolutionary history does the species begin? This is the “species problem,” and it is clearly as much philosophical as it is scientific.

The problem in fact involves two closely related issues: (1) how the notion of a species is to be defined, and (2) how species are supposedly more fundamental or real than other taxonomic categories. The most straightforward definition of species relies on morphology and related features: a species is a group of organisms with certain common features, such as hairlessness, bipedalism, and rationality. Whatever features the definition of a particular species may include, however, there will always be animals that seem to belong to the species but that lack one or more of the features in question. Children and the severely retarded, for example, lack rationality, but they are undeniably human. One possible solution, which has roots in the work of the French botanist Michel Adanson (1727–1806) and was advocated by William Whewell in the 19th century, is to define species in terms of a group of features, a certain number of which is sufficient for membership but no one of which is necessary.

Another definition, advocated in the 18th century by Buffon, emphasizes reproduction. A species is a group of organisms whose members interbreed and are reproductively isolated from all other organisms. This view was widely accepted in the first half of the 20th century, owing to the work of the founders of the synthetic theory of evolution (see above Form and function), especially the Ukrainian-born American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–75) and the German-born American biologist Ernst Mayr (1904–2005). However, it encounters difficulties with asexual organisms and with individual animals that happen to be celibate. Although it is possible to expand the definition to take into account the breeding partners an animal might have in certain circumstances, the philosophical complications entailed by this departure are formidable. The definition also has trouble with certain real-world examples, such as spatial distributions of related populations known as “rings of races.” In these cases, any two populations that abut each other in the ring are able to interbreed, but the populations that constitute the endpoints of the ring cannot—even though they, too, abut each other. Does the ring constitute one species or two? The same problem arises with respect to time: since each generation of a given population is capable of interbreeding with members of the generation that immediately preceded it, the two generations belong to the same species. If one were to trace the historical chain of generations backward, however, at some point one would arrive at what seems to be a different species. Even if one were reluctant to count very distant generations as different species, there would still be the obvious problem that such generations, in all likelihood, would not be able to interbreed.

The second issue, what makes the notion of a species fundamental, has elicited several proposals. One popular view is that species are not groups but individuals, rather like super-organisms. The particular organisms identified as their “members” should really be thought of as their “parts.” Another suggestion relies on what William Whewell called a “consilience of inductions.” It makes a virtue of the plurality of definitions of species, arguing that the fact that they all coincide indicates that they are not arbitrary; what they pick out must be real.

Neither of these proposals, however, has been universally accepted. Regarding species as super-organisms, it is not clear that they have the kind of internal organization necessary to be an individual. Also, the idea seems to have some paradoxical consequences. When an individual organism dies, for example, it is gone forever. Although one could imagine reconstructing it in some way, at best the result would be a duplicate, not the original organism itself. But can the same be said of a species? The Stegosaurus is extinct, but if a clone of a stegosaur were made from a fossilized sample of DNA, the species itself, not merely a duplicate of the species, would be created. Moreover, it is not clear how the notion of a scientific law applies to species conceived as individuals. On a more conventional understanding of species, one can talk of various scientific laws that apply to them, such as the law that species that break apart frequently into geographically isolated groups are more likely to speciate, or evolve into new species. But no scientific law applies only to a single individual. If the species Homo sapiens is an individual, therefore, no law applies to it. It follows that social science, which is concerned only with human beings, is impossible.

Regarding the pluralist view, critics have pointed out that in fact the various definitions of species do not coincide very well. Consider, for example, the well-known phenomenon of sibling species, in which two or more morphologically very similar groups of organisms are nevertheless completely reproductively isolated (i.e., incapable of interbreeding). Is one to say that such species are not real?

The fact that no current proposal is without serious difficulties has prompted some researchers to wonder whether the species problem is even solvable. This, in turn, raises the question of whether it is worth solving. Not a few critics have pointed out that it concerns only a very small subsection of the world’s living organisms—the animals. Many plants have much looser reproductive barriers than animals do. And scientists who study microorganisms have pointed out that regularities regarding reproduction of macroorganisms often have little or no applicability in the world of the very small. Perhaps, therefore, philosophers of biology might occupy their thoughts and labours more profitably elsewhere.

Taxonomy

The modern method of classifying organisms was devised by Swedish biologist Carl von Linné, better known by his Latin name Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78). He proposed a system of nested sets, with all organisms belonging to ever-more general sets, or “taxa,” at ever-higher levels, or “categories,” the higher-level sets including the members of several lower-level sets. There are seven basic categories, and each organism therefore belongs to at least seven taxa. At the highest category, kingdom, the wolf belongs to the taxon Animalia. At lower and more specific categories and taxa, it belongs to the phylum Chordata, the class Mammalia, the order Carnivora, the family Canidae, the genus Canis, and the species Canis lupus (or C. lupus).

The advantage of a system like this is that a great deal of information can be packed into it. The classification of the wolf, for example, indicates that it has a backbone (Chordata), that it suckles its young (Mammalia), and that it is a meat eater (Carnviroa). What it seems to omit is any explanation of why the various organisms are similar to or different from each other. Although the classification of dogs (C. familiaris) and wolves (C. lupus) shows that they are very much alike—they belong to the same genus and all higher categories—it is not obvious why this should be so. Although many researchers, starting with Linnaeus himself, speculated on this question, it was the triumph of Darwin to give the full answer: namely, dogs and wolves are similar because they have similar ancestral histories. Their histories are more similar to each other than either is to the history of any other mammalian species, such as Homo sapiens (human beings), which in turn is closer to the history of other chordate species, such as Passer domesticus (house sparrows). Thus, generally speaking, the taxa of the Linnaean system represent species of organisms whose histories are similar; and the more specific the taxon, the more similar the histories.

During the years immediately following the publication of On the Origin of Species, there was intense speculation about ancestral histories, though with little reference to natural selection. Indeed, the mechanism of selection was considered to be in some respects an obstacle to understanding ancestry, since relatively recent adaptations could conceal commonalities of long standing. In contrast, there was much discussion of the alleged connections between paleontology and embryology, including the notorious and often very inaccurate biogenetic law proposed by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919): ontogeny (the embryonic development of an individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolutionary history of a taxonomic group). With the development of the synthetic theory of evolution in the early 20th century, classification and phylogeny-tracing ceased to be pursued for their own sake, but the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of classification, known as systematics, became a topic of great interest.

The second half of the 20th century was marked by a debate between three main schools. In the first, traditional evolutionary taxonomy, classification was intended to represent a maximum of evolutionary information. Generally this required that groupings be “monophyletic,” or based solely on shared evolutionary history, though exceptions could occur and were allowed. Crocodiles, for example, are evolutionarily closer to birds than to lizards, but they were classified with lizards rather than birds on the basic of physical and ecological similarity. (Groups with such mixed ancestry are called “paraphyletic.”) Obviously, the determination of exceptions could be quite subjective, and the practitioners of this school were open in calling taxonomy as much an art as a science.

The second school was numerical, or phenetic, taxonomy. Here, in the name of objectivity, one simply counted common characters without respect to ancestry, and divisions were made on the basis of totals: the more characters in common, the closer the classification. The shared history of crocodiles and birds was simply irrelevant. Unfortunately, it soon appeared that objectivity is not quite so easily obtained. Apart from the fact that information that biologists might find important—like ecological overlap—was ignored, the very notion of similarity required subjective decisions, and the same was even more true of the idea of a “character.” Is the fact that humans share four limbs with the horses to be taken as one character or four? Since shared ancestry was irrelevant to this approach, it was not clear why it should classify the extinct genus Eohippus (dawn horse), which had five digits, with the living genus Equus, which has only one. Why not with human beings, who also have five digits? The use of computers in the tabulation of common characters was and remains very important, but the need for a systematic theory behind the taxonomy was apparent.

The third school, which has come to dominate contemporary systematics, is based on work by the German zoologist Willi Hennig (1913–76). Known as phylogenetic taxonomy, or cladism, this approach infers shared ancestry on the basis of uniquely shared historical (or derived) characteristics, called “synapomorphies.” Suppose, for example, that there is an original species marked by character A, and from this three species eventually evolve. The original species first breaks into two successor groups, in one of which A evolves into the character a; this successor group then breaks into two daughter groups, both of which have a. The other original successor group retains A throughout, with no further division. In this case, a is a synapomorphy, since the two species with a evolved from an ancestral species that had a uniquely. Therefore, the possessors of a must be classified more closely to each other than to the third species. Crocodiles and birds are classified together, before they can be jointly linked to lizards.

Both the theory and the practice of cladism raise a number of important philosophical issues (indeed, scientists explicitly turn to philosophy more frequently in this field than in any other in biology). At the practical level, how does one identify synapomorphies? Who is to say what is an original ancestral character and what a derived character? Traditional methods require one to turn to paleontology and embryology, and although there are difficulties with these approaches, - because of the incomplete record can one be sure that one can truly say that something is derived? - they are both still used. Why does one classify Australopithecus africanus with Homo sapiens rather than with Gorilla gorilla—even though the brain sizes of the second and third are closer to each other than to the brain size of the first? Because the first and second share characters that evolved uniquely to them and not to gorillas. The fossil known as Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, shows that walking upright is a newly evolved trait, a synapomorphy, that is shared uniquely by Australopithecus and Homo sapiens.

A more general method of identifying synapomorphies is the comparative method, in which one compares organisms against an outgroup, which is known to be related to the organisms—but not as closely to them as they are to each other. If the outgroup has character A, and, among three related species, two have character B and only one A, then B is a synapomorphy for the two species, and the species with A is less closely related.

Clearly, however, a number of assumptions are being relied upon here, and critics have made much of them. How can one know that the outgroup is in fact closely, but not too closely, related? Is there not an element of circularity at play here? The response to this charge is generally that there is indeed circularity, but it is not vicious. One assumes something is a suitable outgroup and works with it, over many characters. If consistency obtains, then one continues. If contradictions start to appear (e.g., the supposed synapomorphies do not clearly delimit the species one is trying to classify), then one revises the assumptions about the outgroup.

Another criticism is that it is not clear how one knows that a shared character, in this case B, is indeed a synapomorphy. It could be that the feature independently evolved after the two species split—in traditional terminology, it is a “homoplasy” rather than a “homology”—in which case the assumption that B is indicative of ancestry would clearly be false. Cladists usually respond to this charge by appealing to simplicity. It is simpler to assume that shared characters tell of shared ancestry rather than that there was independent evolution to the same ends. They also have turned in force to the views of Karl Popper, who explained the theoretical virtue of simplicity in terms of falsifiability: all genuine scientific theories are falsifiable, and the simpler a theory is (other things equal), the more readily it can be falsified.

Another apparent problem with cladism is that it seems incapable of capturing certain kinds of evolutionary relationships. First, if there is change within a group without speciation—a direct evolution of Homo habilis to Homo erectus, for example—then it would not be recorded in a cladistic analysis. Second, if a group splits into three daughter groups at the same time, this too would not be recorded, because the system works in a binary fashion, assuming that all change produces two and only two daughter groups.

Some cladists have gone so far as to turn Hennig’s theory on its head, arguing that cladistic analysis as such is not evolutionary at all. It simply reveals patterns, which in themselves do not represent trees of life. Although this “transformed” (or “pattern”) cladism has been much criticized (not least because it seems to support creationism, inasmuch as it makes no claims about the causes of the nature and distribution of organisms), in fact is it very much in the tradition of the phylogeny tracers of the early 20th century. Although those researchers were in fact all evolutionists (as are all transformed cladists), their techniques, as historians have pointed out, were developed in the first part of the 19th century by German taxonomists, most of whom entirely rejected evolutionary principles. The point is that a theory of systematics may not in methodology be particularly evolutionary, but this is not to say that its understanding or interpretation is not evolutionary through-and-through.

The structure of evolutionary theory

Modern discussion of the structure of evolutionary theory was started by the American philosopher Morton O. Beckner (1928–2001), who argued that there are many more or less independent branches—including population genetics, paleontology, biogeography, systematics, anatomy, and embryology—which nevertheless are loosely bound together in a “net,” the conclusions of one branch serving as premises or insights in another. Assuming a hypothetico-deductive conception of theories and appealing also to Darwin’s intentions, the British philosopher Michael Ruse in the early 1970s claimed that evolutionary theory is in fact like a “fan,” with population genetics—the study of genetic variation and selection at the population level—at the top and the other branches spreading out below. The other branches are joined to each other primarily through their connection to population genetics, though they also borrow and adapt conclusions, premises, and insights from each other. Population genetics, in other words, is part of the ultimate causal theory of all branches of evolutionary inquiry, which are thus brought together in a united whole.

The kind of picture offered by Ruse has been challenged in two ways. The first questions the primacy of population genetics. Ruse himself allowed that in fact the formulators of the synthetic theory of evolution used population genetics in a very casual and non-formal way to achieve their ends. As an ornithologist and systematicist, Ernst Mayr, in his Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942), hardly thought of his work as deducible from the principles of genetics.

The second challenge has been advanced by paleontologists, notably Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), who argue that population genetics is useful—indeed, all-important—for understanding relatively small-scale or short-term evolutionary changes but that it is incapable of yielding insight into large-scale or long-term ones, such as the Cambrian explosion. One must turn to paleontology in its own right to explain these changes, which might well involve extinctions brought about by extraterrestrial forces (e.g., comets) or new kinds of selection operating only at levels higher than the individual organism (see above Levels of selection). Gould, together with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge, developed the theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” according to which evolution occurs in relatively brief periods of significant and rapid change followed by long periods of relative stability, or “stasis.” Such a view could never have been inferred from studies of small-scale or short-term evolutionary changes; the long-term perspective taken by paleontology is necessary. For Gould, therefore, Beckner’s net metaphor would be closer to the truth.

A separate challenge to the fan metaphor was directed at the hypothetico-deductive conception of scientific theories. Supporters of the “semantic” conception argue that scientific theories are rarely, if ever, hypothetico-deductive throughout, and that in any case the universal laws presupposed by the hypothetico-deductive model are usually lacking. Especially in biology, any attempt to formulate generalities with anything like the necessity required of natural laws seems doomed to failure—there are always exceptions. Hence, rather than thinking of evolutionary theory as one unified structure grounded in major inductive generalizations, one should think of it (as one should think of all scientific theories) as being a cluster of models, formulated independently of experience and then applied to particular situations. The models are linked because they frequently use the same premises, but there is no formal requirement that this be so. Science—evolutionary theory in particular—is less grand system building and more like motor mechanics. There are certain general ideas usually applicable in any situation, but, in the details and in getting things to work, one finds particular solutions to particular problems. Perhaps then the net metaphor, if not quite as Beckner conceived it, is a better picture of evolutionary theorizing than the fan metaphor. Perhaps an even better metaphor would be a mechanic’s handbook, which would lay out basic strategies but demand unique solutions to unique problems.