John Dupre

Charles Darwin transformed our understanding of the universe and our place in it with his development of the theory of evolution. 150 years later, we are still puzzling over the implications. John Dupré presents a lucid, witty introduction to evolution and what it means for our view of humanity, the natural world, and religion. He explains the right and the wrong ways to understand evolution: in the latter category fall most of the claims of evolutionary psychology, of which Dupré gives a withering critique. He shows why the theory of evolution is one of the most important scientific ideas of all time, but makes clear that it can't explain everything - contrary to widespread popular belief, it has very little to tell us about the details of human nature and human behaviour, such as language, culture, and sexuality.Darwin's Legacy clears a path through the confusion and controversy surrounding evolution; anyone who is interested in understanding what the theory of evolution can and can't do will find this a compelling and enjoyable introduction.

John Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. Not just in the academic world but increasingly in everyday life, we find one set of experts seeking to explain the ends at which humans aim in terms of evolutionary theory, and another set of experts using economic models to give rules of how we act to achieve those ends. Dupré charges this unholy alliance of evolutionary psychologists and rational-choice theorists with scientific imperialism: they use methods and ideas developed for one domain of inquiry in others where they are inappropriate. He demonstrates that these theorists' explanations do not work, and furthermore that if taken seriously their theories tend to have dangerous social and political consequences. For these reasons, it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do for us. To say this is in no way to be against science - just against bad science. Dupré restores sanity to the study of human nature by pointing the way to a proper understanding of humans in the societies that are our natural and necessary environments. He shows how our distinctively human capacities are shaped by the social contexts in which we are embedded. And he concludes with a bold challenge to one of the intellectual touchstones of modern science: the idea of the universe as causally complete and deterministic. In an impressive rehabilitation of the idea of free human agency, he argues that far from being helpless cogs in a mechanistic universe, humans are rare concentrations of causal power in a largely indeterministic world. Human Nature and the Limits of Science is a provocative, witty, and persuasive corrective to scientism. In its place, Dupré commends a pluralistic approach to science, as the appropriate way to investigate a universe that is not unified in form. Anyone interested in science and human nature will enjoy this book, unless they are its targets.

This sketch of an account of human nature begins with the claim that we should see humans as a kind of process, a life cycle, rather than as a kind of substance or thing. A particular advantage of such a process perspective is that it readily accommodates the developmental plasticity that has been an increasingly important concept in recent biological theory. Human behaviour, on this account, should be understood as providing adaptive and flexible responses to an unpredictable environment. It is, therefore, generally misguided to provide a standard account of human nature in terms of behaviour or behavioural dispositions. If there is such a thing as human nature it is a uniquely refined propensity for novel and unpredictable behaviour.

While plants provide some of the most interesting cases for individuality related problems in philosophy of biology (e.g. Clarke 2012; Gerber 2018), no work has examined plant indi- viduality through specifically focusing on physiological processes, a lacuna this paper aims to fill. We think that different domains of biology suggest different approaches and our specific focus on physiological processes, such as plant hormone systems and source-sink balance regulations, will help to identify coordinated systems at different scales. Identifying physiological individuals is crucial for a wide range of research in plant biology, including re- search on plant nutrition, transport and accumulation of nutrients in edible parts, and plant responses to various stress conditions such as plant diseases and changing abiotic conditions. Although plants do produce systemic responses to local stimuli (e.g. a sudden wound on one leaf can result in a whole plant response), considering them as individuals is (often) problematic. They are highly modular organisms, and they can grow vegetatively, consti- tuting clones of what seem superficially to be individual organisms. Moreover, as with animals, there are problems raised by their symbiotic relations to micro-organisms, most notably the mycorrhiza, through which they may be connected to other plants. We argue that coordinated plant systems can be distinguished at multiple scales from a physiological perspective. While none of these is a unit that must be necessarily called “the individual,” they offer integrated approaches for various research problems in plant science.

This paper begins with some brief intellectual autobiography, recalling my first engagement with philosophy of biology. The substantive part of the paper then focuses on the plurality of possible classifications central to the theses of scientific disunity and metaphysical disorder developed in my early career. After discussing this in terms of biological classification, and introducing the reasons for thinking of classifications as typically value-laden, I discuss two sets of human classifications bearing on normatively vital questions, those around sex and gender and those involved in the distinctions between human races.

In this paper I discuss the process ontology that has been the central focus of my research for almost 20 years. I explain what this is, and illustrate how it applies to biology through the example of the organism. I also aim to show how naturally process ontology fits with the disordered world I described in the preceding article. Finally, I show how process philosophy illuminates a number of topics relating to the human condition, including personal identity and freedom of the will, and provides a deeper understanding of the issue around human classification, notably by sex and gender and by race.

John Dupré presents a set of provocative and highly readable essays exploring the ways in which we categorize animals, including humans: he comes to surprisingly radical conclusions. We must reject the idea that each organism has an essence that determines its necessary place in the unique hierarchy of things. Nature is not organized in a single system. It is a mistake to generalize about human nature--for instance, about the gender roles or sexual behaviour of our species. We must take a pluralistic view of biology and the human sciences.

The term “reductionism” is used broadly for any claim that some range of phenomena can be fully assimilated to some other, apparently distinct range of phenomena. The logical positivist thesis that scientific truth could be fully analyzed into reports of immediate experience was a reductionistic thesis of great significance in the history of the philosophy of science (see logical positivism). In recent philosophy of science, “reductionism” is generally used more specifically to refer to the thesis that all scientific truth should ultimately be explicable, in principle at least, by appeal to fundamental laws governing the behavior of microphysical particles.

A central aspect of science is the classification of natural phenomena. Not only is this to some extent an end in itself, an account of what kinds of things there are being an important part of the picture of the world that science aims to provide. but classification is also inextricably connected with the development of scientific theories. The change from phlogiston theory to atomic chemistry, for example, involved not just a different theory but an entirely new way of sorting the domain of chemistry into kinds. It is often supposed that a necessary condition for an adequate or correct scientific theory is that its generalizations be formulated in terms of natural kinds ‐ those kinds, roughly speaking, that really exist in nature. Thus oxygen, but not dephlogisticated air, may be said to mark a natural kind. Natural kinds are sometimes conceived precisely as being those kinds to which true scientific laws apply. In a ddition, natural kinds have generally been thought of as defined by the common possession of an essence, a property both necessary and sufficient for an entity to be a member of the kind, and from which the further important properties of the kind flow.

This paper briefly describes process metaphysics, and argues that it is better suited for describing life than the more standard thing, or substance, metaphysics. It then explores the implications of process metaphysics for conceptualizing evolution. After explaining what it is for an organism to be a process, the paper takes up the Hull/Ghiselin thesis of species as individuals and explores the conditions under which a species or lineage could constitute an individual process. It is argued that only sexual species satisfy these conditions, and that within sexual species the degree of organization varies. This, in turn, has important implications for species' evolvability. One important moral is that evolution will work differently in different biological domains.

Whether we live in a world of autonomous things, or a world of interconnected processes in constant flux, is an ancient philosophical debate. Modern biology provides decisive reasons for embracing the latter view. How does one understand the practices and outputs of science in such a dynamic, ever-changing world - and particularly in an emergency situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where scientific knowledge has been regarded as bedrock for decisive social interventions? We argue that key to answering this question is to consider the role of the activity of reification within the research process. Reification consists in the identification of more or less stable features of the flux, and treating these as constituting stable things. As we illustrate with reference to biological and biomedical research on COVID-19, reification is a necessary component of any process of inquiry and comes in at least two forms: means reification, when researchers create objects meant to capture features of the world, or phenomena, in order to be able to study them; and target reification, when researchers infer an understanding of phenomena from an investigation of the epistemic objects created to study them. We note that both objects and phenomena are dynamic processes and argue that have no reason to assume that changes in objects and phenomena track one another. We conclude that failure to acknowledge these forms of reification and their epistemic role in scientific inquiry can have dire consequences for how the resulting knowledge is interpreted and used.

Processes produce changes: rivers erode their banks and thunderstorms cause floods. If I am right that organisms are a kind of process, then the causally efficacious behaviours of organisms are also examples of processes producing change. In this paper I shall try to articulate a view of how we should think of causation within a broadly processual ontology of the living world. Specifically, I shall argue that causation, at least in a central class of cases, is the interaction of processes, that such causation is the exercise of a capacity inherent in that process and, negatively, that causation should not be understood as the instantiation of universal laws. The approach I describe has substantial similarities with the process causality articulated by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe for physical causation, making it plausible that the basic approach can be applied equally to the non-living world. It is an approach that builds at crucial points on the criticisms of determinism and universal causality famously articulated by Elizabeth Anscombe.

John Dupré explores the ways in which we categorize animals, including humans, and comes to refreshingly radical conclusions. He opposes the idea that there is only one legitimate way of classifying things in the natural world, the 'scientific' way. The lesson we should learn from Darwin is to reject the idea that each organism has an essence that determines its necessary place in the unique hierarchy of things. Nature is not like that: it is not organized in a single system. For instance, there is no universal principle by which organisms can be sorted into species. We are obliged to accept that different classificatory schemes are equally valid, and to take a pluralistic view of biology and the human sciences. These provocative and readable essays move on to discuss a set of contentious topics relating to human nature. To start with, Dupré argues that the concept of a universal human nature should be rejected. He questions the relevance of evolution to explanation of human behaviour, and casts doubt on the concept of normality in human behaviour. He shows that misunderstanding of biology and evolution has lead to widespread misconceptions about human sex and gender-in particular, about sexual behaviour and gender roles. The books concludes with a pair of essays about the differences between humans and animals, which may not be quite so clear-cut as we think.

This Element is an introduction to the metaphysics of biology, a very general account of the nature of the living world. The first part of the Element addresses more traditionally philosophical questions - whether biological systems are reducible to the properties of their physical parts, causation and laws of nature, substantialist and processualist accounts of life, and the nature of biological kinds. The second half will offer an understanding of important biological entities, drawing on the earlier discussions. This division should not be taken too seriously, however: the topics in both parts are deeply interconnected. Although this does not claim to be a scientific work, it does aim to be firmly grounded in our best scientific knowledge; it is an exercise in naturalistic metaphysics. Its most distinctive feature is that argues throughout for a view of living systems as processes rather than things or, in the technical philosophical sense, substances.

This article documents how biomedical researchers in the United Kingdom understand and enact the idea of “openness.” This is of particular interest to researchers and science policy worldwide in view of the recent adoption of pioneering policies on Open Science and Open Access by the U.K. government—policies whose impact on and implications for research practice are in need of urgent evaluation, so as to decide on their eventual implementation elsewhere. This study is based on 22 in-depth interviews with U.K. researchers in systems biology, synthetic biology, and bioinformatics, which were conducted between September 2013 and February 2014. Through an analysis of the interview transcripts, we identify seven core themes that characterize researchers’ understanding of openness in science and nine factors that shape the practice of openness in research. Our findings highlight the implications that Open Science policies can have for research processes and outcomes and provide recommendations for enhancing their content, effectiveness, and implementation.

The thesis of this paper is that our understanding of life, as reflected in the biological and medical sciences but also in our everyday transactions, has been hampered by an inappropriate metaphysics. The metaphysics that has dominated Western philosophy, and that currently shapes most understanding of life and the life sciences, sees the world as composed of things and their properties. While these things appear to undergo all kinds of changes, it has often been supposed that this amounts to no more than a change in the spatial relations of their unchanging parts. From antiquity, however, there has been a rival to this view, the process ontology, associated in antiquity with the fragmentary surviving writings of Heraclitus. In the last century it has been especially associated with the work of the British metaphysician and logician, Alfred North Whitehead. For process ontology, what most fundamentally exists is change, or process. What we are tempted to think of as constant things are in reality merely temporary stabilities in this constant flux of change, eddies in the flux of process. My main claim in this paper will be that a metaphysics of this latter kind is the only kind adequate to making sense of the living world. After explaining in more detail, the differences between these ontological views, I shall illustrate the advantages of a process ontology with reference to the category of organism. Finally I shall explore some further implications of a process ontology for biology and for philosophy.

This book is a collection of essays by a leading philosopher of biology and spans his career over almost the last twenty years. Most of the topics that have been of concern to philosophers of biology in this period are touched on to some extent, and the collection of these essays in a convenient volume will certainly be welcomed by everyone working in this field. The essays are arranged chronologically, and divided into three sections. Although the chapters in the first section have substantial interconnections, being involved with fundamental conceptual issues in evolutionary theory, on the whole there is not much attempt to tie the book into anything more than a sequence of independent essays. The later sections, moreover, cover a quite diverse range of topics. The whole is neither more nor less than the sum of the parts. For.