Alex Rosenberg

By developing an elaborate allegory, this paper attempts to show that the advertised aim of the Human Genome project, to sequence the entire 3 billion base pair primary sequence of the nucleic acid molecules that constitute the human genome, does not make scientific sense. This raises the questions of what the real aim of the project could be, and why the molecular biological community has chosen to offer the primary sequence as the objective to be funded, when identifying functionally important sub-regions of the genetic material is both far more useful and independently attainable an aim.

This article argues that at least very many judgments of homology rest on prior attributions of selected‐effect (SE) function, and that many of the “parts” of biological systems that are rightly classified as homologous are constituted by (are so classified in virtue of) their consequence etiologies. We claim that SE functions are often used in the prior identification of the parts deemed to be homologous and are often used to differentiate more restricted homologous kinds within less restricted ones. In doing so, we discuss recent criticism of this view that has been offered (especially that offered by Paul Griffiths). *Received July 2007; revised November 2008. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 201 West Duke Building, Box 90743, Durham, NC 27708; e‐mail: [email protected] or [email protected].

Is life a purely physical process? What is human nature? Which of our traits is essential to us? In this volume, Daniel McShea and Alex Rosenberg – a biologist and a philosopher, respectively – join forces to create a new gateway to the philosophy of biology; making the major issues accessible and relevant to biologists and philosophers alike. Exploring concepts such as supervenience; the controversies about genocentrism and genetic determinism; and the debate about major transitions central to contemporary thinking about macroevolution; the authors lay out the broad terms in which we should assess the impact of biology on human capacities, social institutions and ethical values.