Assignment 14 (due 5/6)

There is no assigned reading for this week, so the final assignment is to tell me in some detail how you think this class could be improved? What worked particularly well, what did not? What readings/topics did you particular enjoy, which did you not? I'm always looking for ways of improving my courses. Your input into this process is particularly valuable. I'll consider this to be a completion grade, lest you think I might give you a higher mark for praise. Anyone who writes me some substantive feedback gets a '4'.

Oh, and please also go fill out a simple course evaluation if you're a UI student (these are due by May 10th). Thanks!

Final Meeting: Potpourri (5/6)

For our final meeting, we will close with our final four presentations:

Barbara | Kaitlin commenting
Kaitlin | Graham commenting
Kristian | Troy commenting
Zoe | Kristian commenting

Since we'll be pressed for time, we'll have to be quite strict about timing: each person's discussion should get no more than 3o minutes (including commentary).

Sahotra Sarkar Lecture on Campus

Professor Sarkar will be speaking on a subject that you folks will be specially poised to appreciate this Thursday at 2:30PM in the Whitewater Room. Hope to see you there.

INPC Reminder

Hey folks, just a reminder that the 12th Annual Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on "The Environment" starts on Friday May 1st (at WSU) and continues over the weekend in the UI Commons. For more information, check out the website. If you'd like to be more involved, feel free to get in touch with me.

Final Essays: Guidelines and Due-Date

Your final essays are due by May 11th at 3:30PM. Since I will be traveling, you should submit these to me by email. If you do not receive a response confirming receipt of the essay within 24 hours, please try to get in touch by other means to make sure it came through.

These essays should be somewhat more significant than your first (2,000–3,000 words for undergraduates, 3,000–5,000 words for graduates) and should involve (in a non-trivial way) at least five peer-reviewed sources (including at least three that were not assigned in class).

I'll be using the same rubric as I used to mark the first essays. If you have any questions about what you need to do to get into the right-most column, please don't hesitate to ask. Following my writing advice (and attending to the associated links) will help. Make sure you've got a clearly articulated, specific, focused thesis to argue for. Make sure that you're actually arguing for it, rather than just repeating the claim in slightly different words (keep asking yourself, "How might Slater — or some other moderately intelligent and skeptical reader — object here? How would I respond to those objections?"). And of course you should follow the formatting guide as an easy source of points: you may have your own nifty personal convention, but I'd rather see you consistently put into play a commonly-employed style of citing work, formatting essays, &c.

As usual, I'll be happy to look at drafts, but my ability to do so declines as the deadline gets closer and more people ask me to.

Comments about Comments

I meant to mention something about this last time: commentators are not doing quite what is typically expected. That's my fault for not being clearer as we've gone along — I'm not holding it against you — but you should know how it's done.

Commentary is not generally interactive; they are not a series of questions. Rather, comments are delivered to the speaker first in writing, in the form of a narrative. This narrative may, of course, contain questions or requests for clarification for the speaker, but it should not need to await those answers to make sense. You might think of the commentary as the beginnings of a reply paper (like Lange 2004, for example).

There will be numerous examples of commentary at the upcoming INPC, if you'd like to see some examples of this. For those of you with professional academic aspirations, volunteering to be commentators at conferences such as this is a good way of getting your foot in the door, so to say.

Assignment 13 (due 4/29)

Do you think that there might be ecological laws in Lange's sense?

Meeting 14: Ecological Diversity and Biodiversity (4/29)

Reading:

• Mikkelson, “Ecological Kinds and Ecological Laws” [PDF]
• Sarkar, “Defining ‘Biodiversity’; Assessing Biodiversity” [PDF]

No presentations

This week will be our last with any appreciable reading. All the remaining presentations will be done in our final meeting on 5/6 — to be described in a future post. First, I’d like to spend around 30 minutes or so finishing up our discussion of Lange (2004) — in particular, whether you think that he offers a compelling response to Rosenberg (2001) and whether he offers an attractive picture of natural laws in general. If you find that you are interested in this topic, I’d strongly recommend you pick up a copy of his forthcoming Laws and Lawmakers (I was fortunate enough to read a draft of it). It’s fascinating but still digestible reading.

We’ll then turn to Mikkelson’s essay, which will throw us back to our talk about natural kinds and continue the thread about biological laws. History is often regarded as the dominant “influence” in biology: Mikkelson suggests that its preeminence may be exaggerated. This may be the case, but does he succeed in carving out enough room for ecological laws? I suggest we think about Mikkelson’s paper in the context of Lange’s Nomic Preservation framework.
Finally, we’ll turn to Sahotra Sarkar’s essay on biodiversity. What is it? How should we measure and define it? And how does these choices influence our policy decisions. Sarkar focuses on the first questions, but we see immediately that things in conservation biology are not nearly as simple as one might have naively expected.

Speaking of Professor Sarkar, I remind you that his lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science Lecture series will occur the day after class, Thursday 4/30 at 2:30PM in the Whitewater room (Idaho Commons) on “Heredity before Genetics: The Significance of the Environment”. I hope to see many of you there, as I expect this lecture to connect with much of what we’ve been on about in this course so far. He will also be speaking at the INPC on Saturday at 3PM (on “Environmental Decisions: The Limits of Homo economicus”) in the Aurora room, I believe. In general, there are many excellent philosophers of biology and of the environment coming to town for the INPC (here’s the program). You are all welcome to attend. If you think you’ll be around for several sessions, I can even get you a name tag (fancy!).

Study Questions

• What is the difference between the ideographic and nomothetic aspects of ecology? Why might one regard ecology to be in tension between these two modes of investigation?
• On what grounds does Mikkelson contend that law-like generalizations often explain what he calls historical generalizations?
• What’s the deal with the Sonoran desert studies? What are their significance to Mikkelson?
• What is the “being dropped in a random spot on earth” thought experiment supposed to show? Do you think it successfully shows it?
• Sarkar suggests that there is an analogy between biodiversity and health. How far do you reckon this analogy may be extended?
• Why is “place” important and difficult for conservation biology?
• Sarkar suggests that the attempt to limit the definition of ‘biodiversity’ to a subset of biological entities fails to capture something important about the diversity of biological phenomena. How so?
• Describe the “surrogacy” problem.
• What is the difference between species richness and species diversity? Why does Sarkar think that we should not use species richness to prioritize places?
• Why does Sarkar suppose that there are in fact many different concepts of ‘biodiversity’ at stake in conservation biology?

Assignment 12 (due 4/22)

Do you think Lange successfully rebuts Rosenberg’s contention that his (and others’) attempt to “redefine the concept of law” in biology fails? Explain either way.

Meeting 13: Biological Laws and Special Science Autonomy (4/22)

Reading:

• Rosenberg, “How is Biological Explanation Possible?” [PDF]
• Lange, “The Autonomy of Functional Biology: a Reply to Rosenberg” [PDF]

Presentations:
Cameron | Brian commenting
Graham | Cameron commenting

Rosenberg begins his essay by considering an apparent problem for Hempel’s famous "Deductive-Nomological" (D-N) Account of explanation (also known as the "Covering-Law Model"). The model is so-called, because it identifies an explanation as an argument with some premises (e.g., those stating initial conditions) together with a law statement that deductively implies a conclusion: the event or state of affairs to be explained (the “explanandum”). For example: why did the window shatter? The explanation is that in a fit of rage, I threw a rock at it. There’s no law statement evident in that explanation, but Hempel thought that it was implicit. The fact that I threw a certain object only provides an explanation of the window breaking if that action is connected via a law to the explanandum.

If it turns out, then, that biology has no laws, and we buy the D-N model of explanation, it is unclear how biological explanation is possible. As Rosenberg notes: we need to take for granted that biology does provide explanations — we philosophers had better be able to make sense of this obvious fact.

This is just the background to the dispute between Lange and Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s (2001) is a response to Lange (1995) and Lange (2004) replies to Rosenberg (2001) — we’re giving Lange the last word here. Lange’s account of natural laws in functional biology will also illuminate the question about “reduction” and “special science autonomy” that we grappled with earlier.

Study Questions

• What is Rosenberg’s argument that there can be “few if any strict laws in biology”?
• What is Rosenberg’s argument that there can be “no non-strict laws [in biology]”?
• What is the importance of the concept of natural selection “arms races” (think about the Newts/Garter snakes mentioned earlier in the term)?
• How does Lange respond to Rosenberg’s contentions about arms races?
• Rosenberg contends that Lange’s (1995) use of statements of the form ‘The S is T’ is difficult to construe as a natural law. Why is this?
• Do you think Rosenberg’s proposed law achieves his advertised goals? Does it provide a way of understanding explanations in biology?
• Lange suggests that Rosenberg’s core argument against generalizations like ‘The S is T’ counting as laws involves their possible falsification, not that they will eventually go false (2004, 96). Does this strengthen or weaken Rosenberg’s argument?
• Why does Lange think it’s implausible that “the range of counterfactual suppositions under which an accident is invariant” need not be narrower than the range of a law’s invariance? (Think through the apple-tree and wire examples.)
• How does Lange make room for laws of functional biology by seeing NP as a “general schema” (97)?

Upcoming Presentation Schedule (updated)

Here's what I have for presentations. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If you haven't signed up to comment on anyone else's presentation, you can claim an open spot by emailing me. Remember: you need to have your companion paper (1,500-2,000 words) emailed to me and your commentator by the weekend before your presentation. It would also be a nice idea to include any slides you would like to present if you have them ready (though you do not need to use slides).

Remember: no meeting on 4/8.

12. Biological Laws I (4/15): Cameron | Brian commenting
13. Biological Laws II (4/22): Graham | Cameron commenting
14. Ecology and Biodiversity (4/29): Barbara | Kaitlin commenting; Kaitlin | Graham commenting
15. No assigned topic (5/5): Kristian | Troy commenting; Zoe | Kristian commenting

Assignment 11 (due 4/15)

How do you think Lange would respond to Beatty's argument that there are no distinctively biological laws?

Meeting 12: Biological Laws (4/15)

Reading:

• Beatty, “The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis” [CIEB §11]
• Sober, “Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in the Philosophy of Biology” [CIEB §12]
• Lange, “Are There Laws About Particular Species?” [PDF]

Presentation:
Cameron | Brian commenting

One of the more recalcitrant issues in the philosophy of biology, to my mind, concerns the existence of biological laws. Now, one might well wish to dismiss this debate as unimportant. While it used to be the case that a science was legitimized by the identification of laws, this view has fallen out of favor. Philosophers have gradually come to accept that biology is an important science, whether or not it has laws. As Dupré remarks in his Disorder of Things, “biology is surely the science that addresses much of what is of greatest concern to us biological beings, and if it cannot serve as a paradigm for science, then science is a far less interesting undertaking than is generally supposed” (Dupré 1993, 1). This of course leaves open the issue of whether there are laws in biology: it just emphasizes that biology’s status as a legitimate science doesn’t turn on it.

What are natural laws in general — in, say, physics? This is also a vexed question. Early on, the logical positivists wanted to make sense of laws’ necessity by virtue of something syntactic. But this clearly fails when we consider pairs of syntactically isomorphic propositions like (1) and (2) mentioned by Beatty (CIEB, 221). Something’s being a law thus must have something to do with its content. But what? Laws are necessary truths, but they seem not to be as necessary as broadly logical truths. There’s no inconsistency in the proposition that electrons have a charge of π coulombs. Not so for the claim that some bachelor is married. But then, laws seem to have more necessity than run of the mill contingent truths (like the proposition that every coin in my pocket is made of copper). This perplexing “intermediate” sort of necessity has proved extremely difficult to capture rigorously.

Whatever laws are, it is generally agreed that they possess some degree of necessity and (perhaps because of this) support counterfactuals (claims about what would have been the case, had something else occurred). Here is where Beatty’s expansion of Gould’s evolutionary contingency thesis seems relevant! If facts about biology are “highly contingent”, as Beatty supposes, then it seems that there cannot be genuine biological laws. Perhaps there might be natural laws that in a sense overlap biology (the Hardy-Weinberg “law”, for example?), but these are not distinctively biological.

Lange believes this claim to be too hasty. Perhaps we are being too demanding to require that laws be exceptionless regularities (propositions of the form ‘All Ps are Q’, with no exceptions). As Nancy Cartwright has argued in the past, it may be that even presumably paradigmatic physical laws hold at best ceteris paribus. Be that as it may, biologists evidently have in mind something other than strictly universal generalizations when they say things like ‘the robin’s egg is greenish-blue’. These claims seem to play the role of laws. Indeed, Lange believes that a close look at what role they play in biology might help illuminate what laws are in general.

For more background on the philosophical debates about natural laws, I recommend this entry in the SEP by John Carroll.

Study Questions

• Why does Beatty believe that biological generalizations describe evolutionary outcomes? What does this mean?
• Beatty identifies a weak and strong sense of evolutionary contingency. What is the difference? How do these compare to Gould’s thesis?
• We might identify an argument-from-cartoon in Beatty’s paper (232-3). How might that argument go?
• Why does Lange believe that attempts to circumscribe natural laws by reference to “local predicates” fails?
• How does a claim like ‘The S is T’ differ from the claim ‘All Ss are T’?
• Why is it problematic to construe claims like ‘The S is T’ as ascriptions of T-ness to healthy Ss?
• Beatty speaks at one point of “frozen accidents”. How could Lange put this notion to work?
• How might Lange respond to Beatty’s “Evolutionary Contingency Thesis”?

Different Office Hours

For a various reasons, I need to change my office hours for the next few weeks. Rather than the usual Friday office hours, I'll hold them on Thursday April 2nd, Monday April 6th, Monday April 13th, and Thursday April 23rd, all from 1-3PM. I'll have other times available by appointment. Sorry about this: just turns out that Fridays are getting quite complicated for me for the foreseeable future.

Comments about First Essay

I have distributed the graded first essays. Many of you would have benefited greatly from submitting something early and revising. Hopefully you will take into account my comments and seek help if you need it before tackling your final essay. If you weren't in class today, you can pick up your essay from me in my office during regular office hours or find me at another time.

Some of you seem rather at sea with regard to how to handle citations/references. For the final essay, please follow this formatting guide that describes a standard way of handling in-text citations. It's but one way, yes, but good practice to master it. I will include your successfully following it in the first row of the rubric on the final essay. Please ask if anything is unclear.

Here's how I see the scores on the rubric translating into rough grades: The A range runs from 22-28, B: 16-22, C: 10-16, D: 4-6, F: <4. But don't focus on the grade: focus on what you need to do to improve. Almost all of you needed to drastically increase the focus and specificity of your thesis. This, as I've been saying, sets the terms of a successful essay. It's much easier to argue well for a specific thesis. Please come visit with me sometime if you're not sure how to improve your work for the final essay. I'll be happy to read a draft or outline, talk about your thesis and argument, and help you structure your essay and tighten up your writing.

Assignment 10 (due 4/1)

Formalize Kitcher's argument against reductionism, describing the premises, general principles, and important background assumptions he draws upon as clearly as you can.

Meeting 11: The Reduction/Anti-Reduction Debate (4/1)

Reading:

• S&D Chapters 6–7: “Mendel and Molecules”, “Reduction: For and Against” **
• Sarkar, “Reduction: A Philosophical Analysis” [PDF]
• Kitcher, “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two-Sciences” [CIEB §13]
• Waters, “Why the Antireductionist Consensus Won’t Survive the Case of Mendelian Genetics” [CIEB §14]
• Sober, “The Multiple Realizability Argument Against Reductionism” [CIEB §15] *

Presentation:
Troy | Zoe commenting

Sterelny and Griffiths provide an excellent introduction to the main issues surrounding the reductionist anti-reductionist debate. We can get into this debate by noting the obvious fact that there are a number of different scientific theories (some coming under the heading of an umbrella theory, like biology, perhaps). How do all these different theories relate? Sometimes this relation seems quite unproblematic. Newtonian mechanics simply replaced Galilean mechanics; their relation is that one is closer to the truth than the other and that’s it. But there are also many theories which have a more questionable relationship. We'll focus on the test case of Mendelian genetics and it's relationship to modern molecular biology. Is the latter reducible to the former? What precisely does (or might) that mean? For that matter, is biology an autonomous science or can it all be reduced to physics? Is all science, as Ernest Rutherford put it, “either physics or stamp collecting”?

A terminological note for the Kitcher paper: it uses an older symbolic logic notation that you might not be familiar with. On p. 265, principle (*) reads: ‘(x)(x is a gene <—> Mx)’. This is to be read (in “quasi-English”) as ‘For all x, x is a gene if and only if Mx’. In other words: ‘All genes are Ms, and vice versa’, where ‘Mx’ is an “open sentence”, which basically means a complex predicate — something that can be said of something.

What is going on on page 266? All that’s happening is one direction of (*) — confusingly listed there as (2) — is being used to replace every mention of genes (Gx, Gy) with their molecular equivalents (Mx, My). Don’t worry about it if it’s still obscure. . . . The basic idea is just that (*) and (2) are being used as “bridge principles” for replacing the predicates of classical genetics with those of molecular.

Upcoming Meetings

I'm moving this post to the front: now with actual links (sorry about that delay) for you to use to start planning your presentation. Your final research essay will involve more sources than just these. I'm happy to help you with your search.

10. Organism and Environment — 3/25

• Lewontin, The Triple Helix (entire book)
  
• S&D Chapter 9: “Adaptation, Ecology, and the Environment” **

11. Reductionism versus Anti-Reductionism — 4/1

• Sarkar, “Reduction: A Philosophical Analysis” [PDF]
• Kitcher, “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two-Sciences” [CIEB §13]
• Waters, “Why the Antireductionist Consensus Won’t Survive the Case of Mendelian Genetics” [CIEB §14]
• Sober, “The Multiple Realizability Argument Against Reductionism” [CIEB §15] *
• S&D Chapters 6–7: “Mendel and Molecules”, “Reduction: For and Against” **

No class on 4/8 (Slater at Pacific APA).

12. Biological Laws & Contingency — 4/15

• Beatty, "The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis" [CIEB §11]
• Sober, “Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in the Philosophy of Biology” [CIEB §12] *
• Lange, "Are There Natural Laws Concerning Particular Biological Species?" [PDF]

13. Biological Laws and Special Science Autonomy — 4/22

• Rosenberg, “How is Biological Explanation Possible?” [PDF]
• Lange, “The Autonomy of Functional Biology: a Reply to Rosenberg” [PDF]

14. Ecological Diversity, Biodiversity — 4/29

• Mikkelson, “Ecological Kinds and Ecological Laws” [PDF]
• Sarkar, “Defining ‘Biodiversity’; Assessing Biodiversity” [PDF]

Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on "The Environment" — 5/1–3

15. Final Presentations: Topics TBA — 5/6

• If you are presenting in Meeting 15, final essays are due by Friday 5/15 at 3PM
• They are due Monday 5/11 by 3PM otherwise.

Assignment 9 (due 3/25)

What conception of the environment does Lewontin appear to be targeting in his discussion. Describe it in some detail and explain what he believes is wrong with this conception. What view of the environment does Lewontin advocate?

Meeting 10: Organism and Environment (3/25)

Reading:

• S&D Chapter 11: “Adaptation, Ecology, and the Environment” **
• Lewontin, The Triple Helix

Presentation:
Brian | Graham commenting

We switch gears next time to tackle the interconnections between gene, environment, and organism. Richard Lewontin has been an influential critic of genetic determinism and traditional views about the relationship between organisms and the environment. This book weaves together several of his criticisms into a fascinating, holistic (but not obscurely so) view of biology.

Rather than attempt to summarize the structure of the discussion, I shall leave you to enjoy Lewontin, who is a wonderfully clear writer. My goal for the our discussion, however, will be to try to clarify and evaluate the specifics of Lewontin's proposals, particularly about the relationship between organisms and their environments, but also between genes and organisms. As you'll see, much of the book will also be relevant to our discussion in meeting 11 about reductionism.

Study Questions

• Lewontin contends that discussion of development is fraught with bad metaphors. What specifically are his main concerns?
• What does the Clausen, Keck, and Heisey experiment show?
• Why would Lewontin dispute the claim that knowing an organism’s genome would allow us to specify all of its physical properties?
• According to Lewontin, how should we understand locutions like 'Gene X is for green eyes'?
• What is the difference between "forward" and "backward" modes of adaptive explanations?
• How does Lewontin understand the environment?
• What is the Red Queen hypothesis?
• Why does Lewontin think that "'The environment' does not exist to be saved" (68)?

the plan

Rather than mess up the whole schedule by going back to the HPC/SPC account of natural kinds, as my previous posts indicate, I think we ought to press ahead. We'll spend a little time talking about SPC kinds next time, since I think they're relevant to questions about the reality of race.

Here's what I want to do for your assignments. If you did them: great. Why don't you email me a copy. If you did not: no worries, I'll give you a free pass.

If I'm not mistaken, David was planning on presenting in our next meeting (correct, David?). Would someone like to volunteer to comment on his paper? If all goes as expected, it should be ready by the weekend. Feel free to use the comments: one bonus of using blogger, I guess.

Race Resources

There is a quite a wealth of information on the science of race online. Here's an excellent place to start: http://www.racesci.org/. Richard Lewontin also lectured on the topic a bit ago (video).

See also the reading list for Sally Haslanger and Koffi Maglo's course at MIT on Race.

Assignment 8 (due 3/11)

Respond to two to three study questions for Meeting 9.

Meeting 9: Are Races Real (3/11)

Readings:

• Appiah, "Why There Are No Human Races" [CIEB §22]
• Andreasen, "A New Perspective on the Race Debate" [CIEB §23]

We turn this week to the question of the reality of race. Do our racial concepts correspond to anything genuine in reality or are they merely social constructs? From this simple starting point, lots of interesting methodological issues arise: does the question of the reality of race automatically engage our concepts? Andreasen suggests that it might not. Perhaps there are (real) races and our ordinary understanding of what they are is flawed. In Sober’s introduction to the section on race, he offers an apt analogy to the one time presumption that whales are fish. We can revise this view on the influence of new information without rejecting that fish are a taxonomically-respectable group. Andreasen’s essay attempts to make biological sense of races as subspecies on a cladist model of taxonomy.

Appiah’s approach is different: he is a skeptic of race, placing a great deal of emphasis on the question of whether there is anything in biology that might vindicate our ordinary concept. His approach bears some resemblance to skepticism about the reality of species from the apparent lack of essential properties characterizing them.

As you might expect, my take on this issue is somewhat different: I’m not convinced that what we ought to be looking for is biological reality. Here the HPC/SPC kind view might help some, as it is not a specifically-biological account. I’m not yet sure how the details might go — what the clustered properties would be, whether presumptive clusters would feature the sort of stability (or homeostasis) required, and so on. My suspicion is that there might be something in the neighborhood of stable clusters of biologically/culturally-interesting properties/dispositions that might feature a kind of dwindling stability (think back to the discussion of metastability).

Study Questions

• Describe the difference between the “ideational” and the “referential” views of meaning.
• How does the analogy to acids work for Appiah?
• In what sense does Appiah see Jefferson as interested in a BIOLOGICAL conception of race?
• Compare Appiah’s take on Jefferson and Arnold on the race question.
• Describe the relevance of evolution to the race question. Do Appiah and Andreasen see its relevance in the same way?
• What, in brief, is Appiah’s argument that there are no human races?
• Describe the “no subspecies” argument against the reality of race (both varieties). How does it differ from the “no human subspecies” argument?
• How does Andreasen propose to use cladism to understand human races?

Lewontin at Book People

I'm told that Book People has a bunch of copies of Lewontin's The Triple Helix. Please pick yours up soon --- I don't know that they're saving them for us or something.

New Course Blog for PHIL 417/517

Oy veh: the program I've been using to take care of my personal blog and Phil Bio course blog has managed to corrupt all of those posts. So I've reconstructed the blog on Blogger, which I take it will be a bit more reliable [knocking on wood].

More Suggested Essay Topics

Here are some further topic ideas you might think about for your first essays. Note that you should not simply think of yourself as answering these questions: you should develop a specific thesis and argue for it carefully, in depth. I am also happy to direct you to further readings on your chosen topic (the Sober collection is generally a good place to start, as is the Sterelny and Griffiths book).

• Examine the merits of evolutionary psychology. Clearly, some of its proponents go too far; does it ever provide us with genuine illumination about certain features of our society or psychology?
• Are Buller and Haufe's criticisms completely fair or is there some way for evolutionary psychologists to respond?
• Does Neander succeed at making room for teleology (proper functions) in a mechanistic world? Evaluate her case.
• Paul Davies argues that the systemic capacity theory of functions actually subsumes selected effects functions — does he succeed?
• Are “malfunctions” impossible? Davies claims so in his paper “Malfunctions” [PDF] (the argument is also sketched in his “The Nature of Natural Norms”). Evaluate this claim.
• Dupré and Kitcher suggest that we ought to be pluralists about natural kinds. Evaluate their arguments.
• What are the prospects for natural kinds essentialism? Does Devitt make a compelling case for recognize at least partly intrinsic essences?

Assingment 7 (due 3/4)

One initially plausible objection to my SPC account of natural kinds concerns the specific notion of stability: doesn't this account imply that there can be no natural kinds of unstable elements? For instance, am I committed to the thesis that Uranium-238 is not a natural kind? Surely this would be a good reason for rejecting my account. Do me a favor and construct a response on my behalf.

If you cannot see that this objection has a good response, try to develop it in the most forceful way you can and explain why you do not believe that a response is possible.

Meeting 8: A Different Kind of Natural Kind (3/4)

Readings:

• Boyd, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa” [PDF]
• Slater, “Why the Long Face? The Stable Property Cluster Account of Natural Kinds” [PDF]

As we've seen, the thesis the biological taxa have essential properties (like those supposedly possessed by physical and chemical kinds), looks rather implausible. Since the concept of a natural kind is usually bound up with notion of an essence — a defining characteristic of the kind —, the fall of essentialism has meant for many a denial that species (and other biological taxa) are natural kinds. Indeed, this is a major motivation behind the move to the species-as-individuals thesis. If species are real and not natural kinds, then they must be individuals! I believe that this argument possesses a false premise (that species are not natural kinds) and is fallacious (in particular, it seems a false dilemma to think that species must be either natural kinds or individuals. Perhaps species might fit in another ontological category or perhaps, as I suggested in my "Contentious Metaphysics of Species" paper, species might not be anything and we should instead focus on how to reconstruct talk of species in an ontological non-committal way (e.g. using plural quantification).

The thesis that natural kinds must possess essences, though natural and popular, does not seem to be part of the concept of a natural kind. Their inferential and explanatory role is, to my mind, more central. We’ll focus on a strand of anti-essentialism committed to this stance. Richard Boyd (a philosopher at Cornell) is perhaps the best known defender of anti-essentialism about natural kinds — though I should immediately point out that it is somewhat controversial whether his view should be reckoned as "anti-essentialist" (this is something I'll want to talk about). He defends what he calls a “homeostatic property cluster” (HPC) account of natural kinds on which rather than an essence maintaining the correlation among a bunch of properties we associate with a given kind, the properties, in a way, correlate themselves. No one property among this “cluster” of properties need be regarded as the essence of that kind — they all are. Nor must we view all of the properties as necessarily possessed by members of the HPC kind. The relevant homeostasis may be imperfect, after all.

I find this picture very appealing. But I’m not certain what counts as a homeostatic mechanism and what is meant by certain phrases Boyd uses to cash out this notion: “the causal structure of the world” and so on. This quibble can be answered, I suppose. One answer I can imagine is: “Oh, come on! You know well enough what I mean by ‘the causal structure of the world’! It’s the whole causal economy: the way things work, how everything fits together, what science studies.” But even supposing something like this helped (and I don’t see that it does), a bigger problem for the HPC view is that the kind of homeostasis that Boyd assumes is present is often apparently lacking: say, for higher taxa, species undergoing disruptive selection, or taxa (at the species rank and otherwise) whose coherence is maintained by “phylogenetic inertia”. It seems to me that all we are really committed to with the reality of species is their broad explanatory utility and this can be secured simply by the stability that the relevant cluster of properties features. I defend this thesis in more detail in my “Why the Long Face?” using examples other than species. The paper is a bit on the long side (sorry — this is actually the SHORT version, believe it or not), so you can skim section 2 if pressed for time (you've already heard my views on many of these issues).

Study Questions

• Briefly describe what an HPC natural kind is. How does it help address the problems facing typological thinking?
• What is Boyd’s accommodation thesis?
• How does the essentialism espoused by Boyd differ from a more “traditional” essentialism about natural kinds?
• What is Boyd’s stance on species pluralism?
• How do explanatory and programmatic definitions differ?
• Does Boyd think that there is an important distinction between species and higher taxa (such as genera)?
• Peacocke draws a distinction between narrow- and wide-scope explanations. Describe it and explain how it is relevant to the discussion of the HPC account.
• Describe a criticism of mine of the HPC view. Do you think Boyd could offer a compelling response?
• What specific problem is posed by disruptive selection?
• What is metastability and how might it be relevant to the discussion of HPC kinds?
• Why is stability important for a potential understanding of natural kinds? What role might it play in such understandings?
• How does the SPC account differ from the HPC account?

First Half Essay

Remember: I will be recording your first essay score for your best essay I receive by March 11th (in about two and a half weeks!). Remember: you can write as many as you like (and up to two versions of the same essay) and I will only count your best. I strongly recommend you take advantage of this golden opportunity, as I'll be holding you to the high standard expected of a 400/500-level course (according to your specific affiliation).

Specifically, I will be using this rubric to mark your essays. Worry about the tiles of the columns, not the numbers (which will not correspond in the usual way to grades): to get an 'A', you should expect to have most marks in the 'excellent' / 'very good' columns. A 'B' paper will be more centered around the 'very good' column; with 'C', 'D', 'F', as you'd expect. . . . I'll curve numerical scores to reflect this. Bear in mind, however, that as time approaches (if I'm getting lots of submissions at the same time, my ability to turn around the paper quickly for you to revise or rewrite completely will decrease; the sooner you get me something, the more likely it is that you'll be able to revise it into something better)

I highly recommend going through multiple drafts before submitting something. Take account of the writing advice on my website along with the associated links. I can't recommend the "Bennett Rules" — see Bennett and Gorovitz’s essay on “Teaching Academic Writing” — highly enough. Ask yourself honestly whether the paper is as clear and precise as it can be. Write not only so that you can be understood, but so you cannot be misunderstood.

Assignment 6 (due 2/25)

Pick two of the study questions for Meeting 7 to answer in no more than one sheet total (it may be double-sided).

Meeting 7: Resurrecting Essentialism? (2/25)

Readings:

• Okasha, “Darwinian Metaphysics” [PDF] *
• Devitt, “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism” [PDF]
• Slater, “Biological Laws and Essences” [PDF]

So far we've seen several philosopher pile on against the thesis that species (or other biological taxa) should be treated as natural kinds in the Kripke/Putnam essentialist mold. A central part of the motivation for the species-as-individuals thesis the denial of biological essentialism; ditto for Mayr's resistance to typological thinking in favor of population thinking. There's something of a consensus forming that species lacked essential properties --- intrinsic properties which made them the sorts of things they are.

Michael Devitt has very recently critiqued this consensus as unargued for dogma and presents a new argument in favor of the thesis that biological taxa do in fact possess "at least partly intrinsic" essences. Along the way, he makes a number of important and interesting points worth discussing. Continuing in my critical vein --- you'll have something positive from me at last next week! ---, I argue that Devitt's case for essentialism falls flat. This is not, notice, to argue that essentialism is false --- that's something I want to talk about in more detail with you --- just that we do not yet have good enough reason for being very confident about essentialism.

To foreshadow a later topic a bit, you might give some thought to the role that biological laws play in Devitt's argument. Many philosophers, as you'll see, are deeply skeptical of the idea that there are any distinctively biological laws (let alone laws about particular species). On the other hand, some (like Sandra Mitchell and maybe Marc Lange) hold a view that seems to regard laws as coming in degrees. I'm going to try to write a further section of my paper on how that sort of view might affect the essentialist thesis.

Study Questions

• What, specifically, do you take Devitt's thesis to be? Try to explain it in detailed, neutral terms.
• Devitt mentions an important distinction between a "taxon problem" and a "category problem": what is this distinction?
• How might the taxon and category problems relate to each other?
• How is the above distinction important to Devitt's argument?
• How does Devitt propose to avoid the anti-essentialism purportedly implied by relational species concepts?
• What are Devitt's two arguments for Essentialism?
• Does Slater miss anything in interpreting these arguments? (No really: do I?)
• Describe (and critically evaluate) Slater's criticism of Devitt's first argument.
• Describe (and critically evaluate) Slater's criticism of Devitt's first argument.
• What is the "Monsters Problem" and how does Devitt respond to it?

Meeting 6: The Species Problem & the Metaphysics of Species (2/18)

Readings:

• S&D Chapter 9: “Species” **
• Hull, “A Matter of Individuality” [CIEB §18] **
• Kitcher, “Species” [PDF]
• Crane, “On the Metaphysics of Species” [PDF] *
• Slater, “On the Contentious Metaphysics of Species” [PDF]
• Slater, “Against the Individuality of Species” [PDF] **

There is a sense in which evolution both simplifies and complicates biological taxonomy. For some, it simplifies it by making sense of the interrelatedness of different species, the hierarchical, nested structure of biological similarity, and so forth. On this conception, species should be thought of as "hunks of the genealogical nexus" or "segments of the tree of life". Of course, this broadly historical perspective does not tell us much about how to segment the tree of life. On the other hand, it sometimes seems as though similarity (in some sense) is of primary importance for classification. Common historical origin might help explain this, but we needn't regard history as of primary importance for taxonomy. So what are species?

In an oft-quoted letter to Joseph Hooker (24 December 1856), Darwin took the difficulty of reaching agreement about a correct conception of species as well-nigh insuperable:

It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds when they speak of species; in some, resemblance is everything and descent of little weight — in some, resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea — In some, descent is the key, — in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.

I think he was too quick to give up, but it’s notable that the same sort of disagreements persist: on one recent count, there were over twenty different species concepts being actively pursued. Is just one of these the correct one? Or perhaps we haven't yet come up with the correct species concept. . . . The issue of whether there is just one privileged conception of species (or biological taxa generally) is often referred to as the debate between "monism" and "pluralism" about species. Kitcher contends that we should be pluralists about species — there is no uniquely correct way of dividing up biological reality. Yet, this doesn't mean that species are not real or that there are objective divisions between different biological groups. So he claims. We'll want to talk about this.

The question What are species? has a different sense. Rather than asking after the conditions under which some organisms belong to a species taxon, we might be interested to know into what ontological category these taxa belong. What is an "ontological category"? This in itself is a somewhat fraught question, but the basic idea is that it is a fundamental category of being: for example, objects, processes, events, properties, sets, numbers, propositions, and so forth might all be considered as such categories. If I ask you What are tables? You might respond by trying to tell me the specific conditions under which some pieces of wood compose a table. Or you might start much more generally by telling me that tables are a certain sort of object, thus distinguishing them from properties or events. Tables and wars are in different ontological categories: the former are objects, the latter are events.

Now then: What sort of thing are species? To what ontological category do they belong? We've already seen some concern about treating species as natural kinds (to some, as certain kinds of sets or classes). Perhaps we should consider an alternative. In this spirit, Michael Ghiselin proposed a "radical solution to the species problem":

It would appear that the philosophy of taxonomy is about to undergo a major upheaval. Symptomatic is its Gordian knot, the species problem. Some years ago (Ghiselin, 1966a) I attempted to cut it with the sword, casually remarking that, in the logical sense, species are individuals, not classes. (1976, 536)

The idea seems to be that if we treat species as classes (that is, sets or collections of organisms), we force ourselves into Mayr’s dreaded typological thinking. For the reality of the class would only be secured by some defining essence shared by all (and only) its members. But typology in this sense appears implausible. Perhaps some things have essences (gold, water, electrons, &c.), but the essentialism appears ill-suited to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the biological world.

The case was taken up by David Hull, an influential philosopher of biology (now emeritus at Northwestern), who offered many reason for treating species as individuals (though it is not always clear what precisely he means by this term). You might think as you’re reading whether his reasons for defending the thesis shed more light on the details of his thesis. What are his reasons? Are the good?

This is where Kitcher’s paper on “Species” picks up: he suggests that Hull fails to offer us good reason for accepting the species-as-individuals (SAI) thesis. Kitcher defends the view that species are certain kinds of sets, arguing that this thesis becomes a straw-man in Hull’s essay. But Kitcher takes the species problem seriously. Perhaps we go wrong to assume that there is just one privileged species concept. But does a plurality of species concepts imply that species are not real? He thinks not. We can be pluralistic realists about species. I suspect that we may want to put this case off for another week or so.

Despite Kitcher's criticisms of Ghiselin and Hull, SAI is more popular than ever. My paper "On the Contentious Metaphysics of Species" critiques some recent arguments for SAI in the context of the early arguments. Of course, even if our criticisms hit their mark, SAI might still be true (don't confuse the truth of a thesis with its pedigree). This is roughly the sense I’ve gotten from many philosophers of biology over the years: "yes, Hull makes an inconclusive case for SAI — but it’s still the best metaphysics of species." Even Kitcher later contended that the issue doesn't bear on anything: one can equally well construe species as individuals or sets. I disagree. My paper "Against the Individuality of Species" makes the case that SAI incurs certain expenses that biologists should not front! As this case is primarily metaphysical (trading in particular on particular theses about ontological vagueness), those non-philosophers of you might find things a bit opaque (hence its being optional). But if you’re interested in getting some further background on vagueness, I can recommend Roy Sorensen’s SEP entry and Achille Varzi’s (2001) article “Vagueness, Logic, and Ontology” (particularly the section on ontological versus semantic vagueness).

Study Questions

• Explain how the SAI thesis might fit into the debate about typology versus population thinking.
• How does Kitcher’s assertion that “there is no inconsistency in claiming that species are sets and denying that the members of these sets share a common property” (310) answer one of Hull’s arguments for SAI?
• Describe and evaluate Kitcher's arguments for pluralism.
• Explain some objections to the biological species concept.
• Do you think that pluralism is compatible with realism about species?
• Describe Kitcher's lizard example and what it is intended to show.
• What is the difference between historical and structural explanations? How does this distinction bear on the case for pluralism?
• Does pluralism involve the claim that any species concept is acceptable? Why or why not?
• Why is problematic for SAI-ists to adduce the necessary spatiotemporal connectedness of species as evidence for SAI?
• What is Crane's argument for SAI and what difficulties does it face?

Assignment 5 (due 2/18)

Summarize Kitcher's basic argument for species pluralism as carefully and precisely as you can. If space allows, comment on any potential weak points or premises that appear to need further discussion or support.

Assignment 4 (due 2/11)

(a) Carefully describe the difference between "typological" and "population" thinking.
(b) From what you gather in the Dupré reading, in which camps would you expect Dupré and Putnam to place their allegiances?

Meeting 5: Biological Kinds (2/11)

Required Readings:

• Ridley, “Species Concepts and Intraspecific Variation” [Chapter 13 of Evolution; PDF] **
• Slater, "Natural Kinds" [PDF] --- forthcoming! **
• Mayr, “Typological versus Population Thinking” [CIEB §16]
• Sober, “Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism” [CIEB §17] *
• Dupré, "Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa" [PDF]

This week, we’ll enter into a tangle of issues that will detain us for the next four or so meetings. Our initial focus will be on how the fact of evolution by natural selection impinges on classification. We'll start by talking about the notion of a natural kind. Sorry my survey article is not yet done! I should have a draft ready to share by the weekend. Because it's not ready, I list it as optional. I'll add another post when it's ready for prime-time. Here's the basic idea, though: some scientific categories — electron, water, tiger, &c. — appear to be more "natural" than others in a sense that deserves careful attention. How are we to make sense of this?

The traditional way is by construing some categories (which we call "natural kinds") to be characterized by essential properties — qualities which make things of a particular kind the things of that kind. The late, great biologist (one of the chief architects of the so-called “modern synthesis” of evolutionary biology) Ernst Mayr takes Plato to task for attempting to apply an eidos (something like an abstract type; see CIEB, p. 326) to species. While he’s correct that the notion probably originated with Plato and his theory of forms, it received a much more sophisticated and unmysterious expression with Aristotle. He believed that there was some property (or group of properties) that qualified an organism as the kind of thing it is. Ditto for other examples. Water is a favorite example of modern essentialists like Kripke and Putnam. According to them, the essence of water is having that molecular structure (the one denoted by ‘H2O’); something is water just in case it is composed of H2O and even if that something still looked like and behaved like water. (So goes the thought. My own feeling is that this is much less clear than might at first appear.) However that may be, it was widely thought that species have essences and that this is what makes them real.

But essentialism underpins what Mayr calls "typological thinking". And essentialism may be at the root of many of typology’s supposed ills. Against Aristotle and Plato, I agree with Mayr that we should construe variation as the norm in the biological realm. But there are difficult interpretive questions about what population thinking means for Mayr and how it ought to influence how we conduct and conceive of biology. John Dupré takes on essentialism via Kripke and Putnam's more sophisticated version. He is much exercised by the mismatch between scientific taxonomies and ordinary language classifications.

Study Questions

• What is the basic difference between typological and population thinking?
• Mayr argues against the thought that evolutionary gradualism and typological thinking are compatible. Explicate and evaluate this argument.
• What role does Putnam's "Twin Earth" thought experiment play?
• How does Dupré respond to the Twin Earth thought experiment? Are you sympathetic or has Dupré exaggerated the problems?
• What exactly is the worry about the lilies? Is it serious?
• Do you think that taxonomic realism is more or less plausible at higher levels of classification than species? What is Dupré's view on this question? What about Mayr?
• What reasons are there to be pessimistic that the "privileged sameness relations" Putnam seems to need for his theory exist at the level of species?

Meeting 4: Functions (2/4)

Required Readings:

• Godfrey-Smith, "Functions: Consensus without Unity" [PDF]
• Neander, "Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst's Defense" [PDF]
• Davies, "The Nature of Natural Norms: Why Selected Functions are Systemic Capacity Functions" [PDF]

The function of a heart is to pump blood. Some hearts are defective in this regard: they don’t do what they are supposed to do. We can explain why Smith died on the basis of this sort of malfunction. But it isn’t quite clear how malfunctions make sense in a modern conception of biology. Compare the functions of artifacts. My fridge has the function of keeping things cold (when it fails to, we say that it is malfunctioning). We make sense of this by citing the design of refrigerators: their function is to keep things cold insofar as that was the purpose for which they are built — someone had the intention of building a device that would keep things cold. Note how this explains why we do not ascribe the function of making a subtle humming noise to refrigerators: that wasn’t the purpose for which they were built.

The difficulty in biology should now be apparent. If evolutionary theory excises any need for purposes (Aristotelian Final Causes) or intentional design, how can we then attribute function in any normative sense to biological objects? Two answers (or styles of answers) have dominated the literature: etiological (or selected effect) accounts and systemic capacity accounts. The first is represented by Neander’s paper (but was first proposed by Larry Wright) and takes questions about functions as questions about the explanation of a thing’s existence. To ask what the function of the human heart is, on this account, is to ask in virtue of doing what is the heart possessed by humans. It’s in virtue of the pumping action of hearts (and not, say, the pumping noises they make) that their possessors have prospered. So natural selection, on this view, gives us the sense of normativity which we pretheoretically attribute to (proper) functions.

Not everyone is convinced by this general account. Lots of questions arise here. Is the etiological theory a general account of function (Wright’s version appears to be) or is it only applicable in the biological world? Is it meant as a conceptual analysis of the notion of function? Does it suppose that traits evolved carrying out the function that they now have — can the etiologist make sense of Gould and Vrba’s exaptations? Partly in response to difficulties like these, many philosophers have turned to a more liberal causal role (or systemic capacity) account of function which abjures reference to history (selective or otherwise) in favor of what Cummins called functional analysis. On this systemic capacity view, a trait’s function(s) are just whatever causal capacities that trait contributes to a system. On this view, the “normativity” of function wanes, as the number of distinct functions skyrockets. We may still be able to make sense of the function of the heart to pump blood and not make pumping sounds, in virtue of the fact that the former (but not the latter) activity contributes to the performance of the system in which hearts are embedded.

Davies defends this systemic capacity approach, arguing that it actually subsumes the etiological approach. For an excellent (obviously opinionated) background on the different theories and how they compare, you might consider reading his essay first and then circling back to Neander’s.

Study Questions

• Godfrey-Smith proposes that we should understand functions as effects that have led to a trait's being preserved or proliferated through recent episodes of natural selection. Does this effectively deal with the difficulties facing the etiological approach?
• Describe some prima facie differences in the explanatory aims between the systemic capacity account of functions and the selected effect account.
• Neander mentions three objections to the etiological theory of proper functions. Briefly describe them.
• Neander writes that it is “indeed the vague, unifying, everyday notion of a ‘proper function’ from which the biological notion is derived. Nonetheless, the peculiarities of natural selection impose certain constraints upon a more detailed and precise analysis of the biological notion, . . . constraints which do not apply to the everyday notion employed by artifacts” (175). How does this fit in with her take on the role of conceptual analysis in contrast to theoretical definition.
• What do you think of Neander’s response to the “intellectual arrogance” objection?
• How does Neander propose to deal with the “instant winged lions”? Do you find this a satisfactory response to the problem?
• Briefly describe Neander’s cancer objection to the causal role theory. Does Davies have a credible response?
• What is Davies’ argument that systemic capacity functions have a broader range of application than do selected functions? Does it seem sound?
• Does Davies believe that there are selected functions?
• Why does Davies object to natural norms?
• Why does Godfrey-Smith think that Kitcher is wrong to seek unity in different accounts of function?

Assignment 3 (due 2/4)

Neander discusses three objections to the selected effects view of functions. Choose one to discuss. Carefully explain what the objection is and critically discuss how Neander purports to solve it.

Assignment 2 (due on 1/28)

Pick three of the study questions for Meeting 3 to answer in no more than one sheet total (it may be double-sided).

Best . . . Simpson's . . . "Couch Gag" . . . ever!

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Meeting 3: Sociobiology & Evolutionary Psychology (1/28)

Required Readings:

• Tooby and Cosmides, "Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of Mind and Brain" [CIEB §9]
• Buller, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Critique" [CIEB §10]
• Haufe, "Perverse Engineering" [PDF]
• S&D, Chapters 13-14 **

If we are indeed products of evolution, then doesn’t it stand to reason that our evolutionary past can tell us something about ourselves now (as well as our futures)? This was the basic premise of the “sociobiologists” in the mid-70s and the “evolutionary psychologists” prevalent now. But sociobiology was a controversial theory (or framework) right from the start. Critics smelled genetic determinism, bad adaptationist thinking, sloppy argument, weak empirical support, and so on.

Evolutionary psychology billed itself as the grown-up, fixed-up, and focused version of essentially the same program: integrating evolutionary biology with human psychology. One of the central battlegrounds of this debate concerns our cognitive architecture: is the mind a sort of all-purpose, plastic computer or is it (as many influential evolutionary psychologists suppose) a conglomeration of domain-specific modules? If the latter, presumably, our evolutionary history as foraging primates ought to shed some light on certain features of our psychology now. After all, recorded history represents a rather small portion of hominid history.

I am extremely skeptical about much of evolutionary psychology. So are Buller and Haufe. As you probably know, skepticism is ambiguous: it can mean either disbelief or suspension of belief. Both seem appropriate. Some of the empirical claims of evolutionary psychologists seem to be false; other claims simply lack adequate support. And yet, there is something undeniably attractive about evolutionary psychology as a general strategy, as perhaps, there is with certain forms of adaptationism. The challenge, then, would seem to be how to separate the wheat from the chaff. What if anything can our evolutionary history tell us about ourselves?

Study Questions

• What concerns about sociobiology (as described in the *optional* S&D reading) seem to you most pressing? What about for evolutionary psychology?
• What do you think of Tooby and Cosmides’ claim that the human brain is adapted to the hunting-gathering lifestyle of our Pleistocene forebears?
• Tooby and Cosmides claim that understanding human neural architecture is “a problem in reverse engineering” (184). What, specifically, does this entail?
• Haufe claims that the method of reverse engineering (RE) in evolutionary biology faces some deep conceptual difficulties. What are these difficulties? What empirical difficulties does RE face?
• What are the experiments with the Watson selection task supposed to show about the "modularity" of the mind? Why does Buller believe that they fail to show this?
• Evolutionary psychologists have argued that domain-general cognitive mechanisms, insofar as they are (or would have been) maladaptive, are impossible. Why is this claim false?
• It has been alleged that evolutionary psychology (like sociobiology) involves a heavy does of adaptationism. What kind(s) of adaptationism would you suppose this to be and why?
• What significance does the possibility of genetic drift have in discussions of evolutionary psychology?

Toxic Newts!

I came across this video (from a PBS program) a while ago that presents a lovely example of how "evolutionary arms races" can produce dramatic adaptations. Fun stuff!

Course Requirements & Policies

Now you can recycle your paper syllabi. This post will be your reference for how I will assess your learning in this course.

Attendance & Participation (10%). This should be obvious: you should come to every class meeting (especially for a one-a-week class). After one missed class, each further unexcused absence will reduce your final grade by three percentage points; more than four unexcused absences will mean an automatic failure (you can’t miss a whole quarter of the course and expect to pass — this is not a “skills course”). If you must miss a class (and I’ll be the judge of ‘must’), you should contact me before the class in question (unless circumstances make this impossible for some strange reason — I’ll be the judge of ‘impossible’ as well); missed presentations will be scored a zero and will not be dropped (see below). Earning an ‘A’ for this section of the course will require being an involved and helpful participant (raising questions and engaging in the discussion without dominating it) in the vast majority of our meetings. Simply attending and at looking attentive will get you at most a ‘C’ for participation.

Weekly Assignments (15%). Each week, you will write one sheet in response to a question (or a series of questions) concerning the reading. These will be due at the beginning of class and be evaluated on a 0–4 scale (0=“not done”/“wildly insufficient”, 1=“needs improvement”, 2=“acceptable”, 3=“good”, 4=“excellent!”). While no extensions will be granted for any reason (“legitimate” or otherwise), I will drop your lowest three marks. At the end of the course, I will sum your remaining scores and curve the result so that an average of ‘3’ comes out to a B+.

Impromptu Presentations (20%). Unless you are giving a formal presentation in a certain class (see below), you will be on call to give a short, “impromptu” presentation on a topic of my choosing (generally selected from the study questions I make available on the website or from the weekly reaction paper topic). These will be random. I have a 20-sided die, you’ll each get a number. If your number gets rolled, you’ll speak to us for five or so minutes. I’ll let you punt twice (i.e., you can say, “um, I’d rather not do one of these now” without penalty — but only if you’re there to say it!). These will be scored on that 0–4 scale; I’ll drop the worst non-zero score, and average together the rest and curve the result around a B+.

Short Essay (15%). A short essay (1,500–2,000 words for undergraduates, 2,000–3,000 words for graduates) is due by March 11th at 3:30PM. I will not assign paper topics (though I can give you some suggestions if you’re stuck). Instead, I invite you to write on (subject to my approval) whatever you’re finding most interesting in the course and turn it in whenever you have the opportunity. What’s more, you may submit multiple essays (up to one per week, including at most one rewrite of the same essay) and only your best will count toward this grade category. Since you have all the time in the world to adjust your schedules, late essays will be dealt with rather harshly: late essays will be docked five percentage points per partial day late — e.g., you get a 82% on an essay submitted one hour late; it receives a 77%).

Formal Presentation (10%) & Response (5%). Toward the second half of the term, we will start doing formal in-class presentations of the sort that one would see in a professional academic conference. You will be presenting an original research paper on a topic in the neighborhood of the topic scheduled for class that day. These presentations will run from 10–15 minutes and will be based on a 1,500–2,000 word essay. Each presentation will be assigned a commentator who will offer a five minute commentary after which the speaker will be permitted a brief reply. At this point, we will open up the discussion to the group. You should start thinking early about when you’d like to present and when you’d be willing to comment. Commentators and I should receive the paper by the weekend before the presentation is scheduled.

Final Essay (25%). Your final essay (2,000–3,000 words for undergraduates, 3,000–5,000 words for graduates) will be based on your presentation and should incorporate the feedback you receive on that occasion. These will be due by May 11th at 3:30PM.

I have high expectations of you: that you read everything carefully, that you actively engage with the discussion, that you stringently observe a no-bullshit-policy, and that you complete work on time. But you should have high expectations of me as well. I am very often available outside of class to help you understand course material. I’m happy to read drafts, discuss questions/issues, and help you sort out your thoughts as best I can. If I’m in my office and distractable (as I often am), I’ll try to set my IM status to “Available” (my IM handle is ‘mslater@uidaho.edu’)

Texts:
Sober (Ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 3rd Ed. (MIT, 2006)
Lewontin, The Triple Helix (Harvard, 2000)

Other articles provided in PDF format on the Blackboard website.
The interests of trees and our learning sometimes conflict. Please do what you can to minimize paper waste (use recycled paper, reclaimed paper, &c.; printing the articles two-up, double-sided in Acrobat is usually possible), but please bring copies of the relevant articles to our meetings (on a laptop is fine), as we will often need to read them closely together.

Optional Text: Griffiths and Sterelny, Sex and Death (UChicago, 1999)
This book (referred to as ‘S&D’ in the schedule) is a fairly comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of biology. Several of its chapters provide useful background to the issues we’ll be dealing with; many chapters take on different topics that we won’t get to. If you’re interested in reading more in the philosophy of biology, it’s a great book to have on your shelf.

Meeting 2: Fitness and Adaptation (1/21)

Required Readings: (I recommend going in this order). Remember that starred items are required for grad students, but optional for undergrads; and double-starred items are optional for everyone and that 'CIEB' denotes the Sober collection Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology.

• Mills & Beatty, “The Propensity Interpretation of Fitness” [CIEB §1]
• Sober, “The Two Faces of Fitness” [CIEB §2] **
• Gould & Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm” [CIEB §5]
• Gould & Vrba, “Exaptation: a Missing Term in the Science of Form” [PDF]
• Dennett, “The Leibnizian Paradigm” [PDF] *
• S&D: Chapter 10: “Adaptation, Perfection, Function” **

We'll address two important issues for the interpretation of evolutionary biology this week: the status of Darwinian claims about fitness (captured in such well-known slogans as "the survival of the fittest") and the concept of adaptation and adaptationist thinking.

As I mentioned today, Karl Popper was deeply influential in the philosophy of science through much of the 20th century. His criterion of science — "falsifiability" — stipulated that in order for a theory to be judged as "scientific", a theory must be subjected to "severe tests". There must be experiments you could run or observations you could make that would show the theory to be false. That's a bad criterion of science for several reasons. Suffice it to say, that many perfectly legitimate theories have not been cast away on the basis of a surprising observation. As Kuhn put it, it's a bad carpenter who blames his tools. I might say more about this next time.

Nevertheless, the idea that science should be falsifiable continues to exert a great deal of influence. Perhaps there's some good reason for this. Unfalsifiability may bespeak other theoretical vices, like circularity. This is roughly the charge Mills and Beatty are concerned to rebut in their article on fitness. As we know, differential fitness is required for natural selection to drive evolution. But what is fitness? How is it defined? Not by "burliness" or "speed" or even being adapted to some environment. What matters is reproduction. It's tempting to understand fitness as a measure of how many descendants an individual leaves behind. But then it's no surprise that the fittest survive to reproduce: for fitness is defined as survival to reproduce! Thus, Darwin's theory is circular and not truly scientific. The basic idea behind Mills and Beatty's approach is that 'fitness' in evolutionary theory can be understood in at least two different ways: fitness of an organism and fitness of a type, and that we should construe each of these claims as claims about propensities to reproduce, rather than actual reproductive performance. (Don't worry about trying to understand the example on p. 16 of CIEB in detail — I'll run through it.)

Another source of concern about Darwin's theory is that it is merely a series of promissory notes — that it doesn't actually explain anything, but merely suggests that some evolutionary story or other is tellable. Kitcher effectively responds to this general charge in connection to the falsifiability concern in his "Darwin's Achievement" (which is certainly worth a look if you have the time). But there remains an influential strand of evolutionary thinking which Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin famously dubbed "The Adaptationist Program" and lampooned in the spirit of Voltaire: that any trait can be explained by being adaptive (by contributing to the fitness of the organisms which possess it). The ability to tell some unfalsifiable "just-so" story doesn't really explain anything! One of the interesting issues here is whether Gould and Lewontin go too far in their rejection of adaptationist thinking: whether there isn't something to adaptationist thinking.

Dennett thinks so. He offers a refreshingly frank admission of his longing to believe evolutionary stories involving avian honey guides and aquatic apes. . . . Is he just offering an optimistic counterpoint to Gould and Lewontin? Perhaps since, as Dobzhansky put it "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", some evolutionary story or other has to be behind various adaptations we shouldn't be too worried about indulging in adaptationist reasoning. The Dennett vs. Gould/Lewontin debate is something we should talk a bit about.

Gould and Elisabeth Vrba, a few years after Gould and Lewontin wrote their influential critique of adaptationism, offered an important concept that illustrates a worry with Dennett's optimistic approach. Because some trait is adaptive does not necessarily mean that its prevalence owes to its having been adaptive in that way (this distinction will loom large in our discussion of biological function in a few weeks). Feathers may be a good example: did they arise and proliferate because they were good for flying or because they were good for other things and then get co-opted for flight? Gould and Vrba want to call this an "exaptation".

Study Questions

• You might think about these questions as plausible targets for your impromptu presentations.
• What is a propensity?
• What is the difference between fitness as actual reproductive success and fitness as a “propensity”?
• Explain how understanding fitness as a propensity relieves the circularity problem discussed in Mills and Beatty.
• Mills and Beatty distinguish between the fitness of individual organisms and the fitness of types. What is the difference? Why do they write that fitness of types cannot be a propensity?
• What is an adaptation?
• What is the adaptationist program according to Gould and Lewontin? What’s wrong with it (according to them)?
• What challenges do the adaptationists face in dividing organisms up into traits (according to Gould and Lewontin)?
• Why think that the adaptationist program is unfalsifiable?
• What is “exaptation”?
• What is a “Bauplan”? How does it fit into the debate about adaptationism?

Assignment 1 (due 2/21)

Please write no more than one sheet (two-sides if you must) in response to the following questions. Be succinct but complete. Strive for clarity and detail, keeping your prose as simple as possible.

1) What, precisely, is the circularity worry that many believe Darwin's theory faces? Summarize it and how Mills and Beatty purport to solve it.

2) Describe the difference between 'adaptation' and 'exaptation'.

Meeting 1: Introduction

First meetings of courses are often short, trivial occasions. I see no reason why ours must be. We'll begin by discussing the structure of Darwin's theory, its origin and subsequent elaboration in the context of improved genetic knowledge, and how it has been confirmed to such a dramatic extent. This will put us in a position to begin to address the conceptual questions about evolutionary biology which will detain us for the bulk of the course.

I hope you'll have a chance to read some of the following as background to our discussion. To access these, you will need to log in to Blackboard (if you're registered in the course, you should have access to the blackboard page now --- or you will shortly). If you have not yet registered or are a WSU student, please send me an email and I'll send you a link from which you can download them.

Optional/Recommended Reading:

• Mayr, chapter 2 and chapter 6 of One Long Argument
• Kitcher, "Darwin's Achievement"
• Ridley, chapter 4 of Evolution: this chapter on variation and natural selection may be useful reading for those who feel a bit shaky about their biological background.

See you in class on Wednesday the 14th!