John Dupre

One view of ontology has dominated Western philosophy since the Greeks: the most basic furnishings of the world are things or, in more technical philosophical terms, substances. These are thought of as integrated, persisting through time, not dependent on anything external for their existence, and as the bearers of properties. They are also the subjects of change. This chapter begins with the proposal that we should treat organisms not, as is traditional, as a kind of thing or substance, but as a kind of process. The author begins by explaining this idea a bit further and outlining some of the reasons in its favor. He then considers some of the implications for this position on how we should understand the classification of organisms. Finally the author shows how these considerations provide a deeper ground for the classificatory pluralism that he has advocated for many years.

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.

This chapter attempts to illuminate the dynamic stability of the organism and the robustness of its developmental pathway by considering the biology of cancer. Healthy development and stable functioning of a multicellular organism require an exquisitely regulated balance between processes of cell division, differentiation, and death (apoptosis). Cancer involves a disruption of this balance, which results in unregulated cell proliferation. The thesis defended in this chapter is that the coupling between proliferation and differentiation, whether normal or pathological (as in cancer), is best understood within a process-ontological framework. This framework emphasizes the interactions and mutual stabilizations between processes at different levels and this, in turn, explains the difficulty in allocating the neoplastic process to any particular level (genetic, epigenetic, cellular, or histological). Understanding these interactions is likely to be a precondition of a proper understanding of how these mutual regulations are disrupted in the processes we call cancerous.

John Dupré argues that Kitcher’s goal of a well-ordered science is laudable, but he is skeptical that Kitcher’s proposed solutions to ill-ordered science are either workable or helpful. He questions whether Kitcher’s idealized conversations can be harmonized with actual conversations and also whether such idealized conversations are even relevant for addressing the discord between democracy and science. In addition, while he thinks that the citizen juries that Kitcher recommends are perhaps successful in some cases, such juries are often ill-suited to the task. More generally, given the current social system we inhabit, more systematic political changes are needed. Where Kitcher’s focus is primarily on equality of voice, Dupré argues that well-ordered science is hampered by the inequality of resources that our current social system promotes.

There is a view of science, as stereotyped in the hands of its critics debating with its advocates, that science deals only in facts. Values come in only when decisions are made as to how the facts of science are to be applied. Often it is added that this second stage is no special concern of scientists, though this is an optional addition. This chapter examines what sense can be made of the first part of this story—that science deals only in facts. It looks at the concept of rape in evolutionary psychology and inflation in economics.

This chapter reviews the concept of human nature in the light of recent biology, and considers whether this is a concept that should be imported into the social sciences from biology, or whether its investigation is part of the agenda of the social sciences. The conclusion defended is that human nature can only be understood properly from multiple perspectives, both social and biological. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the status of free will. Deviating from earlier discussion which advocated a traditional libertarianism, the chapter and an appendix defend what what the author calls compatibilist indeterminism.

This chapter reviews recent ideas about the biological basis of race in the light of recent work in population genetics that has been interpreted as claiming that there are, after all, genes that determine racial difference. The chapter reviews a range of meanings of the word ‘gene’ and concludes that none of them lends any support to such a claim. There are geographical differences in the human population, and genetic analysis can reliably discern geographic origins. But ecotypes, geographical variants in a species, are a quite different thing from traditional racial classifications.

This chapter takes up a theme from earlier work, the critique of Evolutionary Psychology. The chapter focuses on one central claim of Evolutionary Psychology, that the crucial human cognitive mechanisms evolved in the Pleistocene, two million years or so prior to the appearance of human civilization. Drawing on the critiques of neo-Darwinism described in Chapter 9, it is argued that the theory is based on an obsolete view of the evolutionary process. A wider view of evolutionary processes, including cultural evolution, suggests that significant evolutionary changes are likely to have taken place in the last few millennia.

This chapter considers one range of possible implications of the view of living things, and the developments in general biology described in the preceding chapters, implications for medical science. In particular, it considers the potential medical significance of such exciting contemporary advances in general biology, in such fields as epigenetics, metagenomics, and systems biology. A more nuanced conception of the biological individual suggests different perspectives on the nature of some diseases, ranging from cancer to diseases caused by microbial pathogens.

This chapter applies some of the biological ideas discussed in earlier chapters to a critique of contemporary neo-Darwinism. Central points are the need to expand the possible modes of inheritance from the genetic to include epigenetic and cultural inheritance; the importance of considering cooperative relations as well as competitive relations between organisms; and the potential importance of external origins of selectable variation, through processes such as endosymbiosis and lateral gene transfer.

This chapter argues that the traditional reductionist notion that complex systems, such as those found in biology, can be fully understood from a sufficiently detailed knowledge of their constituents is mistaken. Contrary to this idea, it is claimed that the properties of constituents cannot themselves be fully understood without a characterization of the larger system of which they are part. This thesis is elaborated through a defence of the concepts of emergence and of downward causation, causation acting from a system on its constituent parts. Going beyond a merely epistemological or methodological reading of the argument, it is proposed that even purely metaphysical understandings of reductionism such as those represented by supervenience theses are misguided.

This chapter offers an overview of the structure, epistemology, and (very briefly) history of contemporary genomics. It asks to what extent the genome contains, or is composed of, anything that corresponds to traditional conceptions of genes. With the exception of what is described as the ‘developmental defect’ gene concept, the answer is found to be negative. However, developmental defect genes typically only correspond to general areas of the genome and not to precise chemical structures. The parts of the genome to be identified for an account of the processes of normal development, on the other hand, are highly diverse, little correlated with traditional genes, and act in ways that are highly dependent on the cellular and higher level environment. Despite its historical development out of genetics, genomics represents a radically different kind of scientific project.

This chapter (and the next) begin to introduce the author’s positive views about the ontological status of biological entities. In particular, it begins to explore the implications of the often neglected fact that life is composed of processes rather than things. The argument is introduced that this processual nature of life is a key to explaining the pluralism that was described in. The argument is developed in detail through examination of the projects of sorting organisms into species and of distinguishing parts of the genome as genes. The crucial topic of the neglect of microbial life in much philosophy and biology is introduced.

This chapter argues against the traditional assumption that science aims to present only facts, and that its findings are entirely independent of any social, political, or ethical values of the society in which it is devised. Central to the argument is the insistence that much of language consists of terms that have both factual and evaluative content (‘thick’ terms). Purely factual language is possible, but only for describing topics about which we mostly don’t much care (mathematics, physics). The attempt to construct a language that is purely factual prevents us from talking about the things that matter to us.

This chapter explains why science is a fundamentally social activity. Not only does science involve the cooperation of many people but, more controversially, socially embedded beliefs, assumptions, and values are inscribed in the way science is done. The chapter also provides a moderate defence of social constructivism, by appeal to a thesis defended by the author for many years, that the classifications on which science is based reflect specific goals of enquiry. As implied by the dubbing of this view as promiscuous realism, this goal-relativity is not taken to deny the truth or objectivity of scientific results.

This chapter defends a pluralistic view of science: the various projects of enquiry that fall under the general rubric of science share neither a methodology nor a subject matter. Ontologically, it is argued that sciences need have nothing in common beyond an antipathy to the supernatural. Epistemically one central virtue is defended, empiricism, meaning just that scientific knowledge must ultimately be answerable to experience. Prima facie science is as diverse as the world it studies; and rejection of this prima facie diversity in favour of a spurious aspiration to unity is grounded in a priori assumption not experience. Disunity, however, does not mean disconnectedness, and the connections between different areas of knowledge are an important theme in the book.

John Dupré explores recent revolutionary developments in biology and considers their relevance for our understanding of human nature and human society. Epigenetics and related areas of molecular biology have eroded the exceptional status of the gene and presented the genome as fully interactive with the rest of the cell. Developmental systems theory provides a space for a vision of evolution that takes full account of the fundamental importance of developmental processes. Dupré shows the importance of microbiology for a proper understanding of the living world, and reveals how it subverts such basic biological assumptions as the organisation of biological kinds on a branching tree of life, and the simple traditional conception of the biological organism. These topics are considered in the context of a view of science as realistically grounded in the natural order, but at the same time as pluralistic and inextricably integrated within a social and normative context. The volume includes a section that recapitulates and expands some of the author's general views on science; a section addressing a range of topics in biology, including the significance of genomics, the nature of the organism and the current status of evolutionary theory; and a section exploring some implications of contemporary biology for humans, for example on the reality or unreality of human races, and the plasticity of human nature.

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 addition, 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.