biohumanities: rethinking the relationship between biosciences, philosophy and history of science,...

Biohumanities: Rethinking the Relationship Between Biosciences, Philosophy and History ofScience, and SocietyAuthor(s): Karola Stotz and Paul E. GriffithsSource: The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 83, No. 1 (March 2008), pp. 37-45Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529561 .

Accessed: 05/05/2013 13:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheQuarterly Review of Biology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 146.232.129.75 on Sun, 5 May 2013 13:45:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529561?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


BIOHUMANITIES: RETHINKING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEENBIOSCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY OF SCIENCE,

AND SOCIETY

Karola StotzCognitive Science Program, Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana 47408 USA

e-mail: [email protected]

Paul E. GriffithsSchool of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney

New South Wales 2006 Australia

e-mail: [email protected]

keywordsbiohumanities, science communication, science criticism, philosophy

of science, experimental philosophy, gene concept, innateness,postgenomic biology

abstractWe argue that philosophical and historical research can constitute a “Biohumanities” that deepens

our understanding of biology itself, engages in constructive “science criticism,” helps formulate new“visions of biology,” and facilitates “critical science communication.” We illustrate these ideas withtwo recent “experimental philosophy” studies of the concept of the gene and of the concept of innatenessconducted by ourselves and collaborators. We conclude that the complex and often troubled relationsbetween science and society are critical to both parties, and argue that the philosophy and history ofscience can help to make this relationship work.

Introduction: What isBiohumanities?

BIOHUMANITIES is a view of the rela-tionship between the humanities (es-

pecially philosophy and history of science),biology, and society. In this vision, the hu-manities not only comment on the signifi-cance or implications of biological knowl-edge but add to our understanding of

biology itself. For example, the history ofgenetics and philosophical work on theconcept of the gene enrich our under-standing of genetics. This is most evidentin classic works on the history of genetics,which not only describe how we reachedour current theories but deepen our un-derstanding of those theories throughcomparing and contrasting them to the

The Quarterly Review of Biology, March 2008, Vol. 83, No. 1

Copyright © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0033-5770/2008/8301-0005$15.00

Volume 83, No. 1 March 2008THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY

37



alternatives that they displaced (Olby 1974,1985). But philosophy of science alsomakes claims about genetics itself in, forexample, discussions of whether the Men-delian gene and the molecular gene arethe same entity (Griffiths and Stotz 2006,2007; Kitcher 1984; Waters 1994).

The biohumanities label (first used asthe title of a research grant held by Grif-fiths: http://paul.representinggenes.org/biohum_home.html) is intended to sug-gest a more intimate relationship betweenbiology and the humanities than is sug-gested by labels such as “biology and soci-ety” or “ethical, legal and social implica-tions” (ELSI). We should emphasize thatwe are primarily concerned with differ-ences in the connotations of these labels,rather than differences in the actual workcarried on under the labels. Much of thework conducted under “biology and soci-ety” or “genomics and society” is closer tobiohumanities (as we will discuss below)than to anything suggested by those labels.The ELSI label has a particularly strongconnotation that biologists provide thefacts while humanists and social scientistsare confined to discussing the implicationsof those facts. In contrast, biohumanitiesresearch aims to feed back into our under-standing of biology itself. Moreover, in thebiohumanities vision, while history andphilosophy of biology may provide re-sources for addressing ELSI issues, that isnot their primary aim.

We see four major aims for research inthe biohumanities: understanding biology,constructive science criticism, contributingto new visions of biology, and contributingto critical science communication. First,and most generally, biohumanities is con-cerned with understanding biology. Al-though the biohumanities are of potentialvalue to both biology and society, this isnot the sole or main justification for engag-ing in this research. Science is fascinatingand important, and it is worth understand-ing science even if understanding it doesnot have an immediate practical payoff,just as evolution is worth understandingwhether or not doing so contributes tocrop improvement or drug development.

As in the biosciences themselves, it is hardto imagine biohumanities researchers do-ing their best work without an intrinsicinterest in the material they study.

Second, biohumanities is a critical enter-prise. Constructive “science criticism” (Pig-liucci and Kaplan 2006:8) stands back fromthe urgencies of actual research to reflecton the strengths and weaknesses of currentapproaches. Thus, as C Kenneth Watershas remarked, the aims of philosophicalanalysis include “to articulate scientificconcepts in ways that help reveal epistemicvirtues and limitations of particular sci-ences. This means an analysis of the geneconcept(s) should help clarify the explan-atory power and limitations of gene-basedexplanations, and should help account forthe investigative utility and biases of gene-centered science” (2004:29).

Science criticism can also involve the“turning-over of stones that had hithertoheld their ground” (Moss 2006:523). His-tory of science points out the “roads nottaken” in science. Without calling intoquestion the data that were gathered, itdemonstrates that other data might havebeen gathered, or that the data that wereactually gathered could have been inter-preted in different ways. Philosophy of sci-ence adds to this enterprise by criticallyanalyzing the chains of reasoning that con-nect specific scientific findings to claimsabout the broader significance of thosefindings. This can lead to changes in inter-pretation that can potentially motivate bi-ologists to reinterpret earlier scientificfindings and to prioritize different ques-tions for future research. Thus, ideally,critical history and philosophy of biologycan contribute to our third goal, the artic-ulation of alternative visions of biology.

Finally, history and philosophy of biol-ogy can contribute to the creation of “crit-ical science communication” both throughconstructive science criticism and by com-municating to a wider audience not merely“what has been discovered,” but somethingof the complexity of the scientific processand the contestability of its findings. To bevaluable, critical work as described in thelast two paragraphs must be “bioliterate,”

38 Volume 83THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY



engaging with the science at the same levelas practitioners rather than via popularrepresentations. But the broad visions ofscience in which it results can be expressedin a nontechnical way, and can thus makea major contribution to the public’s under-standing of science.

The remaining sections of the paper willgive more substance to these remarks withtwo specific examples of research in whichwe have participated: the RepresentingGenes Project and the Innateness Study.Section 1 uses these projects to highlightthe new field of experimental philosophyof science and to introduce the ideas ofscientific concepts as “tools” for researchand the experimental philosopher of sci-ence as a “conceptual ecologist.” Section 2provides an example of how constructivecriticism of research in molecular and de-velopmental biology can lead to the formu-lation of a new vision of “postgenomic bi-ology.” In Section 3, we examine the roleof biohumanities as a critical communica-tor of scientific results and scientific prac-tice to wider audiences. We hope thatthese examples all point toward a new andfruitful relationship between the humani-ties, biology, and society.

1. Experimental Philosophy ofBiology as Conceptual Ecology

The new field of “experimental philoso-phy” (X-phi) brings empirical work to bearon philosophical questions. We have beeninvolved in two X-phi projects. The firstfocused on changing concepts of the gene.Previous research established that it is pos-sible to operationalize questions about thegene concept in a survey instrument com-pleted by researchers, and hence to exam-ine the prevalence of particular gene con-cepts in different biological fields (Stotz etal. 2004). The Representing Genes Projectwas an extension of that earlier work (Stotzand Griffiths 2004). The next sectionbriefly describes the Representing GenesProject, concentrating on the methodsused (for our more substantive discussionof the project’s findings about the geneconcept, see Griffiths and Stotz 2006,2007).

The second X-phi study focused on themuch disputed concept of innateness. Grif-fiths and collaborators examined whichfeatures of behavior lead biologically naı̈veindividuals to label behaviors “innate.”They used their findings to explain thepersistent controversies over the definitionof innateness. We outline this work in Sec-tion 1.2.

1.1 the representing genes projectThis project was an attempt to assess the

impact of the ongoing genomics revolu-tion on concepts of the gene (Stotz et al.2006; Stotz and Griffiths 2004; see alsohttp://representinggenes.org). The actualpractice of genome annotation inspired usto design a simple, annotation-like task forpart one of our survey instrument. This wasused to investigate the criteria that leadbiologists to annotate a particular DNA se-quence as either one gene with severalgene products or several genes with a sin-gle functional product. We used graphicalrepresentations and descriptions of realDNA transcription events in eukaryotic ge-nomes to illustrate the features of genomeexpression that make it difficult to define agene in a way that covers all known cases.Since common definitions of the gene areinsufficient, the simplified annotation taskis designed to reveal the additional implicitcriteria that biologists draw upon when ap-plying the term “gene.”

Another part of the survey instrumentset out to investigate whether, as LennyMoss has argued, investigators either startwith the conception of a gene defined byits predictive relationship to a particularphenotype (Gene P), or with the concep-tion of a concrete gene with a specific mo-lecular sequence and the template capacityto code for many different products, de-pending on how it is transcribed and howits initial product is later processed (GeneD) (Moss 2003). We argued that these dif-ferent starting points would affect how in-vestigators set out to unravel the complexrelationship between genes and other mo-lecular factors with the phenotype. Thesecond task asked subjects to assess thevalue of different research strategies for

March 2008 39“SCI-PHI” SYMPOSIUM



investigating complex diseases. For eachdisease we offered four strategies, designedto run along a continuum from focusingon the statistical relationship between geneand phenotype to entirely giving up onsuch a relationship in favor of analyzingcontent-dependent causal pathways be-tween gene and phenotype. We looked fordifferences in which strategies were fa-vored by biologists from particular back-grounds and also at whether the choice ofstrategies changed for human versus ani-mal disease and for physiological versuspsychological disease.

1.2 the innateness studyIt is a truism that the term “innate” is

vague and ambiguous. Matteo Mameli andPatrick Bateson have recently reviewed thescientific use of “innate” and identified noless than 26 proposed definitions of theterm, of which they judge eight to be bothgenuinely independent definitions and po-tentially valuable scientific constructs (Ma-meli and Bateson 2006). However, theterm “innate” remains immensely popularin psychology and cognitive science. Somephilosophers have proposed that psychol-ogists use the term to indicate that a ques-tion is not their concern and should beaddressed to a biologist instead (Cowie1999, Samuels 2002). But other philoso-phers of science continue to propose anal-yses of the concept of innateness, designedto show that there is a single, coherentnotion of innateness that either does orshould underlie the use of the term in thesciences of the mind. These analyses aretypically subject to intuitively compellingcounterexamples from the proponents ofalternative analyses.

The aim of this study was to providesome solid evidence about the prescientificor “vernacular” understanding of innate-ness. To determine the factors affectingjudgments of innateness, Griffiths, Ed-ouard Machery, and Stefan Linquist exam-ined the responses of biologically naı̈vesubjects to a series of examples of the de-velopment of birdsong. Birdsong was usedbecause it offered the best chance of find-ing closely comparable behaviors exhibit-

ing every combination of the factors thatearlier work had suggested would be rele-vant to judgments of innateness (Griffiths2002).

The results provided clear evidence thatwhen people decide whether a trait is in-nate, they focus on two independentcues—whether the trait is universal andwhether its development is sensitive to en-vironmental influences. There is also ten-tative evidence that people may use a thirdindependent cue, namely whether a traithas a designed purpose. In light of this, theauthors argue in a forthcoming publica-tion that current definitions of innatenesshave each defined it by using one of thecues but ignoring the others. This explainswhy intuitively compelling counterex-amples to each definition can be found soeasily, simply by choosing examples thatmake the other cue(s) salient.

1.3. the philosopher as ecologistOne motivation for the two empirical

studies just described was to transcend thelimitations of traditional conceptual analy-sis. The traditional method of devising aseries of ingenious thought experimentstoo often ends with the proverbial “dullthud of conflicting intuitions” (Bigelowand Pargetter 1987). Experimental philos-ophy has the capacity to assess competinganalyses against data and to avoid biasesthat are introduced by working with a sin-gle subdiscipline or a single school ofthought in the science to be studied.

Such philosophy “in the trenches” is in aprivileged position to provide the bridgebetween philosophy and science, since itsaim to provide biological knowledge unitesit with science itself. At least part of philos-ophy of science has abandoned the ideathat its job is to enforce rigor and precisionwithin science through the stabilizationand disambiguation of scientific meanings.This need not lead to Paul Feyerabend’sconceptual anarchism, in which the historyof science is little more than a series ofchanges in the fashionable topics of scien-tific discussion (Feyerabend 1975). Inplace of these two unpalatable alternatives,we have come to appreciate that concep-




tual change in science is rationally moti-vated by the goals scientists have and bytheir accumulated experience of how toachieve their goals. Empirical science is apowerhouse of conceptual innovation. Thegene concept is a case in point: in its cen-tury of existence the gene has been rede-fined many times, often radically. Thismakes sense if we think of concepts as toolsof research, as ways of classifying the expe-rience shaped by experimentalists to meettheir specific needs. Necessarily, thesetools get reshaped as the demands of sci-entific work change. In the study of con-ceptual evolution, the history of geneticsprovides a “conceptual phylogeny” of thegene. The Representing Genes Project wasan attempt at “conceptual ecology”; that is,an attempt to determine some of the pres-sures that caused the gene concept to di-versify into a number of different epistemicniches.

In this section, we have given a briefdescription of some experimental philoso-phy of biology. We hope that these con-crete examples give some substance to ourclaim that the humanities need not be con-fined to a discussion of the social or ethicalconsequences of biology, but can also con-tribute to a better understanding of biol-ogy itself, and to an understanding of, forexample, what genes are and what it is forsomething to be innate.

2. From Science Criticism to a NewVision of Postgenomic Biology

Biohumanities is a critical enterprisethat reflects on the epistemic virtues andlimitations of current approaches. For ex-ample, an analysis of the gene conceptshould aim to shed light on the investiga-tive utility and biases of gene-centered ex-planations in molecular, developmental,and evolutionary biology (Waters 2004).

As a result of the Representing GenesProject, we have come to embrace a ver-sion of the widely accepted dichotomy be-tween an abstract, statistical gene and aconcrete, mechanistic gene (Falk 2000;Gilbert 2000, 2003; Moss 2003), but havefelt the need to introduce a further distinc-tion between a simple “consensus gene,”

based on prototypical examples of how ge-nome structure supports genome function,and a “postgenomic gene” that embracesthe messy reality of the wide range ofknown relationships between genome andgenome product (Griffiths and Stotz 2006;see also Gerstein et al. 2007). We believethat the nature of the postgenomic genesupports the view that phenotypes are notsimply expressions of genetic information,but rather emerge from a developmentalsystem that encompasses many aspects ofwhat would traditionally be regarded as theenvironment.

Contemporary gene-centered accountsin molecular and developmental biologyrest on a static, structural conception ofthe gene that clings as closely as the factswill allow to its starting point in the longsuperseded idea that one gene corre-sponds to one polypeptide. In its place,one of us has promoted the idea of “con-stitutive molecular epigenesis.” This re-places the metaphor of “gene action” withthe more suitable metaphors of sequence“activation,” sequence “selection,” and se-quence “creation.” These metaphors re-flect what happens during the expressionof the genome through transcriptional, co-transcriptional, and posttranscriptional pro-cessing of DNA coding sequences, whengenes are composed on the fly by recom-bining in time- and tissue-specific ways thetemplate capacity of the genome (Stotz2006a, 2006b).

Postgenomic biology has brought with ita new conception of the “reactive genome”that is not only activated and regulated,but in which sequences are actively se-lected and newly created during an expres-sion process that includes signals from theinternal and external environment. This iscongruent with the view that alleged ex-planatory categories such as “genetic” ver-sus “environmental,” instead of explainingthe origin of a phenotype, preclude fur-ther investigation into its real causes.

The concept of a genetic trait, and therelated idea of innateness, are often de-fended by pointing to the allegedly uniquerole of DNA in heredity. Transgenera-tional stability of form, however, requires




more than faithful transmission of DNA.Genome sequences depend on the contextfor their differential expression. Naturalselection selects adaptive phenotypes thatare always derived from nonlinear interac-tions among a range of diverse develop-mental resources. Their organization fre-quently exhibits phenotypic plasticity, acapacity that allows the organism to reactadaptively to different environmental condi-tions (Pigliucci 2001; West-Eberhard 2003).The stable but sufficiently plastic inheritanceof an adaptive developmental system resultsfrom the reliable transmission of all the nec-essary developmental factors across genera-tions. In other words, heredity relies on astable “developmental niche” that is faith-fully reconstructed by various combinationsof the population, the parent, and the organ-ism itself. The unit of evolution is the wholedevelopmental system (Schlichting and Pig-liucci 1998; Waddington 1952).

To understand heredity and develop-ment we should “ask not what’s inside thegenes you inherited, but what the genesyou inherited are inside of” (West andKing 1987:552). What counts is not onlythe particular gene you inherit but alsowhen, where, and how it is expressed by atime- and tissue-dependent regulatory net-work. Given the vulnerability of the ge-nome to environmental influences, it wassimply a matter of time before most sys-tems found ways to manage aspects of theirdevelopmental niche. Cytoplasmic chemi-cal gradients, mRNAs, and transcriptionfactors, together with the necessary cellularorganelles and structures that are inher-ited with the ovum, give this process a headstart. Maternal control over the fetus’s en-vironment extends to the uterus or pre-hatchling state, and postnatal factors, suchas the licking of pups by rat mothers, con-tinue to influence gene expression levels.The protein packaging of DNA provides animprinting system, often called the histoneor chromatin code, which gives parentspre- and postnatal control over the off-spring’s gene expression (Meaney 2004).Parental effects also include differentialprovisioning of resources, preference in-duction (oviposition, imprinting on food,

habitat, and mates), and social learning(Jablonka and Lamb 2005; Mousseau andFox 2003).

There have been repeated attempts toreduce all of these mechanisms of ex-tended inheritance to the action of inher-ited or parent-of-origin genes, so that, ulti-mately, the real causes are all genetic. Thisspecial pleading fails in light of the discov-ery that development relies not only on thepresence of particular genes in an organ-ism but at least as much on the regulatedexpression of genomes, which ultimately de-pends on environmental, as well as genomic,factors. Wherever there are genes, there areextragenetic factors necessary for their regu-lated expression.

The sketch just given shows how sciencecriticism can lead to changes in interpreta-tion of known facts to give rise to a differ-ent—in this case radically different—visionof biology. One aim of constructing such anew vision is to potentially motivate biolo-gists to reinterpret earlier scientific find-ings and to prioritize different questionsfor future research. Another, as we now goon to discuss, is to contribute to a moreadequate form of science communication.

3. Biohumanities and Critical ScienceCommunication

If the history and philosophy of biologyhas something to offer to the public under-standing of science, it is to contribute tothe creation of a critical science communi-cation process, one aimed at making ex-pert understanding accessible while sim-ultaneously revealing it as contestable.Historians of science have often tried toachieve this by emphasizing the contin-gency of the intellectual frameworks withinwhich science accommodates data andwhich, in turn, influences the kinds of datathat are collected. By documenting the his-torical influences that led scientists toadopt a particular intellectual framework,they suggest that different choices mighthave led science to develop in a differentmanner. Discussions of the origin of theinformational framework for understand-ing genetics make a case for historical con-tingency of this kind (Kay 2000; Keller




1995). This is not to suggest that the cur-rently dominant intellectual frameworkdoes not accommodate the data that hasbeen gathered, or even that it was not (oris not) a fruitful source of discoveries. Thepoint is rather that there are other ways tolook at that data and that there are otherkinds of data that might be gathered.

Philosophers of science have been lessconcerned than historians with the con-testability of science. Their main contribu-tion to science criticism has been to ana-lyze the chains of reasoning that connectspecific scientific findings to claims aboutthe broad significance of those findings.There is a very direct connection betweenthis work and the public understanding ofscience, since it is just these broader claimsabout the wider significance of some classof scientific findings that tend to be thefocus of popular science writing. For exam-ple, following the popularization of post-Hamiltonian evolutionary genetics by TheSelfish Gene (Dawkins 1976) and similarworks, philosophers of science discussedwhether the developments in evolutionarygenetics in the 1960s and 1970s really im-plied that the individual gene is the unit ofevolutionary change. Some argued thatthis model of the evolutionary process wassimply equivalent to more traditional mod-els. Others argued that there were substan-tial scientific reasons to prefer more tradi-tional models in at least some cases. Ratherthan being straightforward empirical mat-ters, these questions were shown to turnon philosophical issues such as the natureof theory reduction or the relationshipbetween prediction and explanation(Sterelny and Griffiths 1999). The work ofa number of philosophers and biologistsgradually established that the most sociallyprominent claim made on the basis of mid-20th-century genetics—that the fundamen-tal principle of evolution is selfishness—isat least as much a matter of semantics as ofscientific discovery (Sober and Wilson1998). Given the long history of attemptsto draw lessons for society from the natureof the evolutionary process, this conclusionis of obvious value.

The other way in which the biohumanities

can contribute to critical science communi-cation is through creating and criticizingbroad visions of biology in the sense de-scribed in Section 2. For example, take theclaim by ethologists such as Patrick Bateson(1976) and Richard Dawkins (1986) that bi-ological development is more like the execu-tion of a recipe than the execution of ablueprint. Communication theorists havecriticized this proposal on the grounds thatmany audiences do not understand thesemetaphors in the way their creators intended(Condit 1999a, 1999b). But this assumes thatBateson and Dawkins’s aim was to find agood metaphor to communicate the knowncontent of science. Instead, at the level ofthis broad summary of what we have learnedfrom a century of genetics, the content ofscience is contested. The two metaphors em-body different, competing visions of thatcontent. The recipe metaphor is an attemptto communicate the vision that morphogen-esis is less like the workings of a computerthan a chemical reaction. Developmental bi-ologist H Frederick Nijhout writes, “The sim-plest and also the only strictly correct view ofthe function of genes is that they supply cells,and ultimately organisms, with chemical ma-terials,” (1990:444). Although Nijhout doesnot use the “r-word,” it is on the tip of histongue: the protein-coding sequences in thegenome are a list of ingredients. Thus, at thedeepest level, the recipe metaphor was in-tended, not as a device for popularization,but as a vision of developmental biology, andone intended to be taken as seriously as 17th-century life scientists such as Stephen Halestook the idea that the body is a machine.Critics of the blueprint metaphor have writ-ten of the need for a “gestalt-switch”—achange in scientific vision—so that, withoutnecessarily questioning any specific findingsof past research, biologists will come to seethose findings differently and perhaps prior-itize different questions for future research.In the same way, those who defend meta-phors like that of the genetic program areusually convinced that the analogy betweenthe genome and some aspect of computertechnology is very close indeed. For exam-ple, someone who believes that small RNAsare the real key to the control of develop-




ment will emphasize the “digital,” combina-torial nature of the specificity of these se-quences for the regions of DNA that theybind (Mattick 2004). For such authors, acomputational vision of the genome embod-ies in a diffuse way a set of expectations,research emphases, and tactical decisionsabout what to build into artificial experimen-tal systems.

Authors in the biohumanities are in anexcellent position to contribute to discus-sions of this kind. The broad interpretationsof biology that they offer are founded, in thebest cases, on an extensive knowledge of thebiology itself and an extensive historicalknowledge of how current intellectual for-mations came into being, as well as of theroads not taken. This puts them in a positionto break out of conventional representationsof biology and create new visions. For exam-ple, one of the most striking new metaphorsof recent years has been philosopher andformer cell biologist Lenny Moss’s descrip-tion of the regulation of gene expression asthe work of “ad hoc committees” of mole-cules assembled not on the basis of someplan to be found in the fertilized egg, but onthe basis of the particular molecular “exper-tise” available in a cell as a result of its actualhistory of transactions with other cells/tis-sues and with influences derived from thewider environment (Moss 2003). This is ametaphorical expression of the sort of “post-genomic biology” that we sketched in Sec-tion 2. Moss’s new figurative landscape hasbeen embraced by one major contributor tothe literature on the public understanding ofgenetics (Turney 2005).

ConclusionThis paper described a conception of the

role of history, philosophy, and social studiesof biology in relation to biology itself, a con-ception that we termed “biohumanities.”Biohumanities research has four relatedaims: deepening our understanding of biol-ogy itself, engaging in constructive sciencecriticism, creating alternative visions of biol-ogy, and achieving critical science communi-cation. In Section 1 we outlined how the new“experimental philosophy” methods cancontribute to the first of these aims. Sections2 and 3 demonstrated the potential of bio-humanities research to further the otherthree aims.

Physicist Richard Feynman is to have saidthat philosophy of science is of no more useto science than ornithology is to birds. In thispaper, we have tried to show that this is veryfar from the truth. The complex and oftentroubled relations between science and soci-ety are critical to both parties, and the phi-losophy and history of science can help tomake this relationship work. In reality, phi-losophy and history of science may be asvaluable to science as conservation biology isto birds (Wilkins 2006).

acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by theNational Science Foundation under Grants #0217567and #0323496. Any opinions, findings, and conclusionsor recommendations expressed in this material arethose of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect theviews of the National Science Foundation. Griffiths’swork on the paper was supported by Australian Re-search Council Federation Fellowship FF0457917.

REFERENCES

Bigelow R, Pargetter R. 1987. Functions. Journal ofPhilosophy 84:181–197.

Bateson P P G. 1976. Specificity and the origins ofbehavior. Pages 1–20 in Advances in the Study ofBehavior, Volume 6, edited by R A Rosenblatt et al.New York: Academic Press.

Condit C M. 1999a. How the public understands ge-netics: non-deterministic and non-discriminatoryinterpretations of the “blueprint” metaphor. Pub-lic Understanding of Science 8:169–180.

Condit C M. 1999b. The Meaning of the Gene: PublicDebates About Human Heredity. Madison (WI): Uni-versity of Wisconsin Press.

Cowie F. 1999. What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered.Oxford (UK): Oxford University Press.

Dawkins R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Dawkins R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. London(UK): Longman.

Falk R. 2000. The gene: a concept in tension. Pages




317–348 in The Concept of the Gene in Developmentand Evolution, edited by P Beurton et al. Cam-bridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.

Feyerabend P. 1975. Against Method. London (UK): Verso.Gerstein M B, Bruce C, Rozowsky J S, Zheng D, Du J,

Korbel J O, Emanuelsson O, Zhang Z D, Weiss-man S, Snyder M. 2007. What is a gene, post-ENCODE? history and updated definition. GenomeResearch 17:669–681.

Gilbert S F. 2000. Genes classical and genes develop-mental: the different uses of genes in evolutionarysyntheses. Pages 178–192 in The Concept of the Gene inDevelopment and Evolution, edited by P Beurton et al.Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.

Gilbert S F. 2003. Evo-devo, devo-evo, and devgen-popgen. Biology and Philosophy 18:347–352.

Griffiths P E. 2002. What is innateness? The Monist85:70–85.

Griffiths P E, Stotz K. 2006. Genes in the postgenomicera. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27:499–521.

Griffiths P E, Stotz K. 2007. Gene. Pages 85–102 inCambridge Companion for the Philosophy of Biology,edited by D Hull and M Ruse. Cambridge (UK):Cambridge University Press.

Jablonka E, Lamb M J. 2005. Evolution in Four Dimensions:Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in theHistory of Life. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Kay L E. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of theGenetic Code. Palo Alto (CA): Stanford University Press.

Keller E F. 1995. Refiguring Life: Metaphors of TwentiethCentury Biology. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kitcher P. 1984. 1953 and all that: a tale of two sci-ences. Philosophical Review 93:335–373.

Mameli M, Bateson P P G. 2006. Innateness and thesciences. Biology and Philosophy 22:155–188.

Mattick J S. 2004. RNA regulation: a new genetics?Nature Reviews Genetics 5:316–23.

Meaney M J. 2004. The nature of nurture: maternaleffect and chromatin modeling. Pages 1–14 inEssays in Social Neuroscience, edited by J T Cacioppoand G G Berntson. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Moss L. 2003. What Genes Can’t Do. Cambridge (MA):MIT Press.

Moss L. 2006. The question of questions: what is agene? comments on Rolston and Griffiths & Stotz.Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27:523–534.

Mousseau T A, Fox C W. 2003. Maternal Effects asAdaptations. Oxford (UK) and New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Nijhout H F. 1990. Metaphors and the role of genesin development. BioEssays 12(9):441–446.

Olby R C. 1974. The Path to the Double Helix. Seattle(WA): University of Washington Press.

Olby R C. 1985. The Origins of Mendelism. Second Edi-tion. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press.

Pigliucci M. 2001. Phenotypic Plasticity: Beyond Nature

and Nurture. Baltimore (MD): Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press.

Pigliucci M, Kaplan J. 2006. Making Sense of Evolution:The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology.London (UK) and Chicago (IL): University ofChicago Press.

Samuels R. 2002. Innateness. Mind and Language 17:233–265.

Schlichting C D, Pigliucci M. 1998. Phenotypic Evolution: AReaction Norm Perspective. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer.

Sober E, Wilson D S. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolutionand Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge(MA): Harvard University Press.

Sterelny K, Griffiths P E. 1999. Sex and Death: AnIntroduction to the Philosophy of Biology. Chicago(IL): University of Chicago Press.

Stotz K. 2006a. Molecular epigenesis: distributedspecificity as a break in the Central Dogma. Historyand Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28(3–4):527–544.

Stotz K. 2006b. With genes like that, who needs anenvironment? postgenomics’ argument for theontogeny of information. Philosophy of Science 73:905–917.

Stotz K, Bostanci A, Griffiths P E. 2006. Tracking the shiftto “post-genomics.” Community Genetics 9:190–196.

Stotz K, Griffiths P E. 2004. Genes: philosophical anal-yses put to the test. History and Philosophy of the LifeSciences. 26:5–28.

Stotz K, Griffiths P E, Knight R D. 2004. How scientistsconceptualize genes: an empirical study. Studies inHistory and Philosophy of Biological and BiomedicalSciences 35:647–673.

Turney J. 2005. The sociable gene. EMBO Reports6:809–810.

Waddington C H. 1952. The evolution of develop-mental systems. Pages 155–159 in Twenty-EighthMeeting of the Australian and New Zealand Associationfor the Advancement of Science, edited by D A Her-bert and A H Tucker. Brisbane (Australia): Gov-ernment Printer Brisbane.

Waters C K. 1994. Genes made molecular. Philosophyof Science 61:163–185.

Waters C K. 2004. What concept analysis should be(and why competing philosophical analyses ofgene concepts cannot be tested by polling scien-tists). Studies in History and Philosophy of the LifeSciences 26:29–58.

West M J, King A P. 1987. Settling nature and nurtureinto an ontogenetic niche. Developmental Psychobi-ology 20:549–562.

West-Eberhard M J. 2003. Developmental Plasticity andEvolution. Oxford (UK) and New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Wilkins J. 2006. Philosophers Are to Science, as Or-nithologists Are to Birds. http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2007/06/philosophy_is_to_science_as_or.php.




biohumanities: rethinking the relationship between biosciences, philosophy and history of science,...

Documents