Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philosophy of Biology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2014), 200 pp., $29.95.

Abstract

Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Philosophy of Biology Cailin O’Connor March 9, 2015 In Philosophy of Biology, Peter Godfrey-Smith provides an introductory overview of some of the most important areas in the field. Each chapter of the book focuses on a major research topic (or cluster of topics) in philosophy of biology. Since most readers here will be interested in the book for teaching purposes, this review will outline the main topics of the book and then briefly discuss its merits as a course text. Godfrey-Smith begins with a discussion of laws, mechanisms and models in biology. As he points out, philosophers of biology have largely rejected the idea that biological knowledge is usefully thought of as law-like. It is famously difficult to make broad gener- alizations about the biological world—exceptions abound. 1 Recent attempts to account for biological knowledge have instead focused on mechanistic explanation (especially in molecular and neurobiology) or on mathetmatical modeling (especially in evolutionary biology and ecology). Godfrey-Smith seems to support a pluralistic view of biological knowledge where ‘resilient’ or ‘stable’ generalizations can take the place of biological laws and where both mechanistic and mathematical analyses can generate genuine biological knowledge. Godfrey-Smith moves on to discuss evolution by natural selection. He lays out sev- eral influential accounts of evolutionary change rather than committing to one. As he points out, any such account that is simple and predictive will struggle with difficult cases, whereas accounts that attempt to cover all interesting cases of change by natural selection will be trivial. Godfrey-Smith’s discussion of fitness concepts in this chapter is particularly clear. He distinguishes those that focus on the actual structure of an organ- ism as embodying its fitness and those that are based on offspring count, including both propensity definitions and definitions that simply associate fitness with actual offspring produced. He finishes the chapter with a very brief overview of work on levels of selection and on Darwinian concepts as applied to non-biological realms. In fact, researchers have just discovered an exception to the central dogma of molecular biology: that codes for amino acid sequences are derived from DNA and RNA (Shen et al. 2015).