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Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

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If you listen to biologists talk for just a few minutes, you're likely to hear how some organ has function X, how well a protein is designed for purpose Y, or how some piece of DNA has meaning Z. These aren't creationists, but hard-headed scientists discussing the blind operation of nature. Nothing in nature "means" anything in the sense that a human word has meaning, nothing has "purpose" in the sense that some intelligence has assigned a goal to the object. They why do serious people use such anthropomorphic terms?

Most of all, why does this language lead to such stunning successes in understanding the mechanisms of life?

That is Lewens' goal, to figure out just what the thought processes are behind those words. His search isn't just intellectual word-play, it's a search for the basis of human understanding in biology. As in any experimental science, biological tests are phrased as questions: do real-world facts contradict the statement in question, yes or no? The scientific outcome of the experiment is just a physical phenomenon, but the answer to the question is semantic. That is the point that Lewens addresses: how the meaning of the question maps into physical phenomena, and how results map from phenomena to meaningful answers. The meaning of the question is the most fundamental factor in the scientific process.

Lewens does a very good job in this analysis. He avoids the dogmatic absolutism that seems to characterize other philosophers' answers. Biologists, after all, are usually happy to look at any one problem in two or three ways that contradict each other. Lewens seems to place more importance on what the practicing scientists believe than in philosophical theory - a habit that lends relevance to his work, or avoids immediate irrelevance. Despite his generally sound foundation in scientific fact, Lewens still shies from answers in statistical form; future work should address that weakness, but it did not detract from the general thrust of his discussion.

Lewens has chosen an important field of study, and has addressed it with respect for the people who work in that field. He succeeds in showing that philosophy can be a constructive force in modern life and thought. I have to admit, however, that many of his distinctions were drawn so finely that the details blur together for me even a little while later. There are times when the words matter, but scientists tend to putter along quite happily without approaching this level of fussiness. This book is interesting, but not easy to apply within the field that it addresses.

//wiredweird