Alex Rosenberg

Social and behavioral scientists — that is, students of human nature — nowadays hardly ever use the term ‘human nature’. This reticence reflects both a becoming modesty about the aims of their disciplines and a healthy skepticism about whether there is any one thing really worthy of the label ‘human nature’. For some feature of humankind to be identified as accounting for our ‘nature’, it would have to reflect some property both distinctive of our species and systematically influential enough to explain some very important aspect of our behavior. Compare: molecular structure gives the essence or the nature of water just because it explains most of its salient properties. Few students of the human sciences currently hold that there is just one or a small number of such features that can explain our actions and/or our institutions. And even among those who do, there is reluctance to label their theories as claims about ‘human nature’. Among anthropologists and sociologists, the label seems too universal and indiscriminant to be useful. The idea that there is a single underlying character that might explain similarities threatens the differences among people and cultures that these social scientists seek to uncover. Even economists, who have explicitly attempted to parlay rational choice theory into an account of all human behavior, do not claim that the maximization of transitive preferences is ‘human nature’. I think part of the reason that social scientists are reluctant to use ‘human nature’ is that the term has traditionally labeled a theory with normative implications as well as descriptive ones.

In the Museum of Science and Technology in San Jose, California, there is a display dedicated to advances in biotechnology. Most prominent in the display is a double helix of telephone books stacked in two staggered spirals from the floor to the ceiling twenty-five feet above. The books are said to represent the current state of our knowledge of the eukaryotic genome: the primary sequences of DNA polynucleotides for the gene products which have been discovered so far in the twenty years since cloning and sequencing the genome became possible.

Is a government required or permitted to redistribute the gains and losses that differences in biological endowments generate? In particular, does the fact that individuals possess different biological endowments lead to unfair advantages within a market economy? These are questions on which some people are apt to have strong intuitions and ready arguments. Egalitarians may say yes and argue that as unearned, undeserved advantages and disadvantages, biological endowments are never fair, and that the market simply exacerbates these inequities. Libertarians may say no, holding that the possession of such endowments deprives no one of an entitlement and that any system but a market would deprive agents of the rights to their endowments. Biological endowments may well lead to advantages or disadvantages on their view, but not to unfair ones.I do not have strong intuitions about answers to these questions, in part because I believe that they are questions of great difficulty. To begin, alternative answers rest on substantial assumptions in moral philosophy that seem insufficiently grounded. Moreover, the questions involve several problematical assumptions about the nature of biological endowments. Finally, I find the questions to be academic, in the pejorative sense of this term. For aside from a number of highly debilitating endowments, the overall moral significance of differences between people seems so small, so I interdependent and so hard to measure, that these differences really will 1 not enter into practical redistributive calculations, even if it is theoretically i permissible that they do so.Before turning to a detailed discussion of biological endowments and their moral significance, I sketch my doubts about the fundamental moral theories that dictate either the impermissibility or the obligation to compensate for different biological endowments.

Defiendo la legitimidad de la pregunta acerca de cuál puede ser el estatuto cognitivo de la Teoría Económica, y sostengo que la Teoría se comprende mejor como una rama de la Filosofía Política formal, en concreto, como una especie de contractualismo. Esto parece particularmente adecuado corno explicación de la Teoría deI equilibrio general. Dado el carácter intencional de las variables explicativas de la Teoría Económica y el papel de la información al realizar una elección, se argumenta que es improbable que dicha Teoría pueda garantizar el poder predictivo, que le permitiría funcionar corno teoría factual en vez de corno teoría normativa.I defend the integrity of the question of what the cognitive status of economic theory could amount to, and I argue that the theory is best understood as a compartment of formal political philosophy, in particular a species of contractarianism. This seems particularly apt as an account of general equilibrium theory. Given the intentional character of the explanatory variables of economic theory and the role of information in effecting choice, it is argued that economic theory is unlikely to secure the predictive power that would enable it to function as a factual instead of a normative theory.

In The Structure of Biological Science I argued that the theory of natural selection is a statistical theory for reasons much like those which makes thermodynamics a statistical theory. In particular, the theory claims that fitness differences are large enough and the life span of species long enough for increases in average fitness always to appear in the long run; and this claim, I held, is of the same form as the statistical version of the second law of thermodynamics.For the latter law also makes a claim about the long run, and its statistical character is due to this claim: thermodynamic systems must in the long run approach an equilibrium level of organization that maximizes entropy. Over finite times, given local boundary conditions, an isolated mechanical system, like the molecules in a container of gas, may sometimes interact so as to move the entropy of the system further from, instead of closer to the equilbrium level. But given enough interacting bodies, and enough time, the system will always eventually move in the direction prescribed by the law. Thus, we can attach much higher probabilities to the prediction that non-equilibrium systems will reflect greater entropy in future periods than we can to predictions that they will move in the opposite direction. And as we increase the amount of time and the number of bodies interacting, the strength of the probability we can attach to the prediction becomes greater and greater.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the conceptual methodological, and epistemological problems of biology, and treats in depth the major developments in molecular biology and evolutionary theory that have transformed both biology and its philosophy in recent decades. At the same time the work is a sustained argument for a particular philosophy of biology that unifies disparate issues and offers a framework for expectations about the future directions of the life sciences. The argument explores differences between autonomist and anti-autonomist views of biology. The result is a vindication of reductionism, but one that is unexpectedly hollow. For it leaves the exponents of the autonomy of biology from physical science with as much as their view of biology really requires - and rather more than the reductionist might comfortably concede. Professor Rosenberg shows how the problems of the philosophy of biology are interconnected and how their solutions are interdependent, However, this book focuses more on the direct concerns of biologists, rather than the traditional agenda of philosophers' problems about biology. This departure from earlier books on the subject results both in greater understanding and relevance of the philosophy of science to biology as a whole.

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism, the biological justification of ethics, the so-called 'trolley problem' in moral philosophy, the political philosophy of biological endowments, and the Human Genome Project and its implications for policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework which promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to scholarship in many areas.

In The Structure of Biological Science I argued that the theory of natural selection is a statistical theory for reasons much like those which makes thermodynamics a statistical theory. In particular, the theory claims that fitness differences are large enough and the life span of species long enough for increases in average fitness always to appear in the long run; and this claim, I held, is of the same form as the statistical version of the second law of thermodynamics.For the latter law also makes a claim about the long run, and its statistical character is due to this claim: thermodynamic systems must in the long run approach an equilibrium level of organization that maximizes entropy. Over finite times, given local boundary conditions, an isolated mechanical system, like the molecules in a container of gas, may sometimes interact so as to move the entropy of the system further from, instead of closer to the equilbrium level. But given enough interacting bodies, and enough time, the system will always eventually move in the direction prescribed by the law. Thus, we can attach much higher probabilities to the prediction that non-equilibrium systems will reflect greater entropy in future periods than we can to predictions that they will move in the opposite direction. And as we increase the amount of time and the number of bodies interacting, the strength of the probability we can attach to the prediction becomes greater and greater.

Rosenberg applies current thinking in philosophy of science to neoclassical economics in order to assess its claims to scientific standing. Although philosophers have used history and psychology as paradigms for the examination of social science, there is good reason to believe that economics is a more appropriate subject for analysis: it is the most systematized and quantified of the social sciences; its practitioners have reached a measure of consensus on important aspects of their subject; and it encompasses a large number of apparently law-like propositions