A sign of the growing maturity of philosophy of biology is the publication of an impressive book like this one, which includes chapters on twenty topics germane to the philosophy of biology and five brief biographies of influential theoretically minded biologists. The choice of biographies is a little idiosyncratic and, like philosophy of biology as a whole, shows a bias toward population genetics. Included in the volume are brief biographies of Charles Darwin, R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, and Motoo Kimura. In his entry, Sahotra Sarkar argues that Haldane is a more significant participant in the Evolutionary Synthesis than is generally thought, but nonetheless, one wonders whether Aristotle, Gregor Mendel, Francis Crick, Ernst Mayr, John Maynard Smith, and Richard Lewontin among others are equally deserving of an entry in such a volume. The detailed chapters by Raphael Falk on genetic analysis and Margaret Morrison on population genetics are also mostly historical.
The philosophical chapters are rich—many written by leading figures in the field. Christopher Stevens begins the philosophical sections with a discussion of natural selection followed by Anya Plutynski's contribution on neutralism and Robert Wilson's on levels of selection. Kim Sterelny argues that evolvability should be thought of as a dispositional property of lineages much like fitness is a dispositional property of individual organisms. Unlike most others who have written on evolvability, he stresses external factors that influence evolvability, such as range of available environments and population structure. D. M. Walsh proposes three different ways of relating evolution and development: development as a constraint on evolution, development as selecta, and development as adaptive. The second is congenial to developmental systems theorists who argue that developmental resources are just as important as replicators in creating and explaining phenotypes. The third way is more radical: the organism is a self-organizing system whose significant phenotypic plasticity causes adaptedness and also the diversity of organic form. He concludes that all three proposals are “coherent positions” and, perhaps selling conceptual philosophy of biology a little short, that the issue of which of the three proposals is most plausible can be settled empirically. Michael Bradie and Catherine Wilson in separate articles address the relationship between evolution and normativity. The evolutionary biologist A. W. F. Edward's contribution discusses maximization principles in biology and surprisingly brings together Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, evolution as entropy maximization, and parsimony in phylogenetic tree construction. Alex Rosenberg gives an overview of the reductionism debate, a relatively detailed case study from the developmental biology of insect wings, and argues that reductionism properly construed seeks to replace how-possibly evolutionary explanations with why-necessary molecular explanations, but (as of yet) this cannot be done without appeal to an unreduced principle of natural selection. Michael Wheeler's argumentative chapter draws on debates in the philosophy of mind and plausibly argues that the coding relation should not be analyzed merely in terms of causal covariance. He concludes that, strictly speaking, RNA codes for protein, while DNA does not code for anything, and argues that this asymmetry is the bullet we have to bite. I am unconvinced that we should treat translation and transcription so differently, especially if we consider their similar etiological functions in prokaryotic organisms. Marc Ereshefsky presents a succinct overview of the various debates surrounding biological species and along the way argues for a pluralist view of the species category and for the superiority of his and Matthen's “Population Structure Theory” view of species over Richard Boyd's frequently discussed “Homeostatic Property Cluster” view of species as natural kinds. In a useful overview, Brian K. Hall nicely compares and contrasts various concepts often conflated: homology, homoplasy, analogy, homogeny, covergence, parallelism, reversals, rudiments, vestiges, and atavisms. Robin O. Andreasen argues that the question of the reality of race is more complicated than often thought and defends her cladistic view that human races are “monophyletic groups of reasonably reproductively isolated populations” (472). One challenge is how to unpack Andreasen's term “reasonably reproductively isolated” in a quantitatively useful way. Complicating the picture, given that human populations have not been totally isolated, both branching and reticulated representations of human phylogeny can be useful in different contexts depending on one's goals. In a more technical chapter, Paul Thompson summarizes the dispute between the syntactic and semantic accounts of theories and argues for the superiority of the semantic account in biological theories. Many of Thompson's arguments against the syntactic account depend on the limitations of first order logic, and, relatedly, he advocates a “natural extention” to the semantic view (what he calls the “Galilean conception”) that allows for richer mathematics to be utilized. It is not clear to me why the advocate of the syntactic view cannot also append more sophisticated mathematics to first order logic to create a more sophisticated syntactic view and thus avoid much of Thompson's criticism. Tim Lewens contrasts the selected effects (or etiological) accounts of biological function with goal directed accounts. Swimming against the dominant current, he advocates a goal directed view and thinks that the apparent appeal of the selected effects view of function derives from a historically overplayed analogy between biological traits and artifacts. He briefly sketches a naturalistic “Kantian projectivism” that holds that viewing organisms as possessing goals has no explanatory worth in itself, but is merely heuristic because it leads biologists to a proper nonteleological explanation. As he acknowledges, the difficult job remains to show that the projection of goals onto organisms is necessary and not merely useful or as Daniel Dennett might put it, a necessary stance rather than one possible stance (of many) one could take toward the biological world. Unlike Lewens, Karen Neander advocates a selected effects view of function. In her entry, she considers a bridge between philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology, that is, teleosemantic theories of mental content or the use of biological notions of function to explain the intentionality of psychological states. She argues persuasively that many philosophers have mistakenly considered neuroscience to be a nonintentional science and there is not a great divide between intentional folk psychology and supposedly nonintentional neuroscience as many philosophers of mind have assumed. André Ariew discusses the slippery concept of innateness and suggests that developmental biology holds the key to clarifying the concept. Using bird songs as an example, he argues we should replace the distinction between innate and acquired with an innate-triggered-acquired trichotomy where ‘triggered’ traits are those that are (or perhaps ‘have’) ‘environmental phenotypic switches’ that initiate canalized developmental pathways in C. H. Waddington's sense of canalization. The volume ends with a discussion of artificial life research by Mark Bedau, who, among other things, points out that the goal of artificial life research is more than merely trying to create artificial lifelike properties, but also to provide a way of approaching the question of the essential properties of actual life.
An obvious competing volume to the Handbook is the recently published Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Biology. (Blackwell and Oxford University Press also have similar volumes in the works.) André Ariew, Tim Lewens, Alex Rosenberg, Sohotra Sarkar, Rob Skipper, and Kim Sterelny have chapters in both, and not surprisingly there is a lot of overlap in content. Nonetheless, Mattern and Stephen's volume includes entries on artificial life, evolvability, species, homology, race, teleosemantics, formalism, and the historical sections that are not found in the Cambridge Companion. On the other hand, the Cambridge Companion contains entries on biodiversity, mechanisms, evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, religion, macroevolution, ecology, and gene that the Handbook does not. My only complaint about the book as a whole is the price (US$165), which makes it poorly suited as a required supplementary text for the classroom. It deserves, however, to be in the reference section of your university library and on your bookshelf if you are a philosopher of biology or philosophically inclined biologist.
