We argue that the economy of nature constitutes an invocation of structure in the biological sciences, one largely missed by philosophers of biology despite the turn in recent years toward structural explanations throughout the philosophy of science. We trace a portion of the history of this concept, beginning with the theologically and economically grounded work of Linnaeus, moving through Darwin’s adaptation of the economy of nature and its reconstitution in genetic terms during the first decades of the Modern Synthesis. What (...) this historical case study reveals, we argue, is a window into the shifting landscape of the explanatory and ontic uses of structural concepts. In Linnaeus, the economy of nature has both ontic and explanatory import; in Darwin the ontic and explanatory aspects start to come apart ; and finally, in the Modern Synthesis, the economy of nature is replaced by the conceptual toolkit of population genetics, the structural elements of which are nearly entirely explanatory. Having traced a historical trajectory of structural concepts that moves from an ontic formulation to an increasingly explanatory one, we conclude by outlining some insights for structural realism. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have come to realize that the relationship between science and values raises questions which are both important and not readily answered. It is true that the major figures in that tradition known as ‘logical empiricism’ appreciated that science always exceeds its empirical grasp and that it is necessary for scientists to be guided and constrained by so-called ‘epistemic values,’ these being values (in the words of one supporter) ‘presumed to promote the truth-like character of science, its (...) character as the most secure knowledge available to us of the world we seek to understand.’ However, these values — such things as internal and external consistency, simplicity, predictive accuracy and fertility, unificatory power (consilience) — were considered special. Inasmuch as they could not be reduced to basic principles of logic — and there were attempts to do this — they were still thought of, in some sense, as beyond the vagaries of human emotion. Their importance was not a function of the individual’s personal inclinations, nor of those of the group, whether this group be understood as a closely knit band of researchers or even up to a complete society. (shrink)

This paper presents a historical examination of the influence of the Darwinian metaphor 'the struggle for existence' on a variety of scientific theories which inform our current understanding of the prospects for sustainable development. The first part of the paper traces the use of the metaphor of struggle through two distinct avenues of thought relevant to the search for sustainable development. One of these avenues leads to the biophysical critique of conventional development popularised by 'ecological economists' such as Georgescu-Roegen and (...) Daly. This critique suggests that modern economic systems have gone astray by failing to respect the biological and physical limits to development and that they should be adapted to make them more like ecological systems. The other avenue leads to the modern insights of evolutionary psychology. These latter insights suggest that in certain key respects, the economic system (and actors within it) are already behaving more or less like an ecological system, driven as they are by evolutionary imperatives. Consequently, this second avenue appears to offer far bleaker prospects for achieving sustainable development than the first. However, the final part of the paper re-examines the historical roots of the metaphor itself, and suggests a number of ways in which a critical response to those historical roots might influence our understanding of the prospects for sustainable development. (shrink)

Numerous authors have examined the influence of other thinkers on Darwin’s formulation of some of the key concepts of the theory of evolution. Amongst those, Alexander von Humboldt often stands out – a scholar who, following his intention to explain the interconnection of various parts of the natural system, seems to tackle the question of evolution but does not offer an explicit answer. In this article, I examine Humboldt’s thoughts on evolution and the origin of species and evaluate his contribution (...) to Darwin’s theory of evolution. First, I analyse and explicate the fundamental assumptions and goals of Humboldt theory, and compare them to Darwin. Moving forward, I highlight the similarity of their methods, and argue that Humboldt and Darwin conduct similar investigation of fossil record and geographical distribution of species. Finally, I show that Humboldt acknowledges essential elements of Darwin’s theory of evolution: evidence given by fossil records, struggle for survival and relation between natural environment and living organisms. Humboldt, however, concludes we cannot know the evolution of species. I explain this stance, and contend that theories of Humboldt and Darwin turn out to be more similar than they seem, yet their different conclusions regarding the evolution of species stem from different initial assumptions underlying their respective frameworks. (shrink)

Here we discuss the challenge posed by self-organization to the Darwinian conception of evolution. As we point out, natural selection can only be the major creative agency in evolution if all or most of the adaptive complexity manifest in living organisms is built up over many generations by the cumulative selection of naturally occurring small, random mutations or variants, i.e., additive, incremental steps over an extended period of time. Biological self-organization—witnessed classically in the folding of a protein, or in the (...) formation of the cell membrane—is a fundamentally different means of generating complexity. We agree that self-organizing systems may be fine-tuned by selection and that self-organization may be therefore considered a complementary mechanism to natural selection as a causal agency in the evolution of life. But we argue that if self-organization proves to be a common mechanism for the generation of adaptive order from the molecular to the organismic level, then this will greatly undermine the Darwinian claim that natural selection is the major creative agency in evolution. We also point out that although complex self-organizing systems are easy to create in the electronic realm of cellular automata, to date translating in silico simulations into real material structures that self-organize into complex forms from local interactions between their constituents has not proved easy. This suggests that self-organizing systems analogous to those utilized by biological systems are at least rare and may indeed represent, as pre-Darwinists believed, a unique ascending hierarchy of natural forms. Such a unique adaptive hierarchy would pose another major challenge to the current Darwinian view of evolution, as it would mean the basic forms of life are necessary features of the order of nature and that the major pathways of evolution are determined by physical law, or more specifically by the self-organizing properties of biomatter, rather than natural selection. (shrink)

In his classic study,The Great Chain of Being, Arthur Lovejoy delineated a complex set of concepts and assumptions which referred to the perfection of God and the fullness of creation. In attempting to distil the basic or ‘unit idea’ which constituted this pattern of thought, he focused on the assumption that ‘the universe is aplenum formarumin which the range of conceivable diversity ofkindsof living things is exhaustively exemplified’. He called this the ‘principle of plenitude’. Lovejoy argued that this idea implied (...) two others—continuity and gradation—and that together these reflected a pre-occupation with the ‘necessity of imperfection in all its possible degrees’, a concern which had pervaded Western thought since Plato and gave rise to the powerful ontology known as the ‘great chain of being’. (shrink)

If we look at Isis as an archive of research articles representing ways in which historians have written about science over the past century, then one changing practice can be found in discussions of the usefulness of metaphors in the history of the sciences. During the first half of Isis’s history, metaphors were represented in stable categories: image studies, scientific analogies, diffusion, and individual scientists associated with metaphor. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, tools drawn from sociology, feminism, and the (...) history of literature, among others, created new discussions about how metaphors might be used. More recently, useful hybrids have further diversified the ways in which metaphors are discussed. Throughout the history of Isis, the usefulness of metaphors has been renegotiated in ways that suggest a periodization of metaphoric use and access to alternative histories of the sciences. (shrink)

It seems to me that no substantial support can be provided for the thesis that the Darwinian theory of evolution drew significantly upon ideas in contemporary Political Economy. What Darwin may have derived from Malthus was not an integral part of the theory of population that the classical economists, including Malthus, put forward. He did not know the literature of Political Economy; and if he had been acquainted with it, he would not have been able to derive anything from it (...) that was important for the theory of natural selection. The judgment that “with Darwin's theory there was a real transfer of knowledge from political economy to biology” (Pancaldi 1985:262) cannot be sustained. (shrink)