Positions

In this debate, the possible answers are generally seen as starkly opposed: either laws exist in biology or they don’t. However, some authors have sought to defend more nuanced positions by attempting to recast what a law is. Here we focus on positions scientists and philosophers have taken about whether there are laws in particular subfields of biology.

• Paleobiology:

  • Yes: Stephen J. Gould

• Organismal Biology:

• Molecular Biology:

  • Yes: C. Kenneth Waters, Marc Ereshefsky

• Population Genetics:

  • Yes: Alexander Rosenberg

• Macroevolution:

  • Yes: Robert Brandom and Daniel McShea

  • No:

Proposed Types of Laws of Nature in Biology

Evolutionary laws

Zero Evolutionary Force Law

Natural Selection

Source laws:

Generalizations specifying the sources of the selection pressures for the traits in question.

Sober, E. (1984), The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Dispositional laws

"Any organism with the genetic makeup G in any environment ranging from E1 to En undergoing biochemical reactions R1 through Rn will come to have phenotypic characters C1, C2, ... ,Cn.” Hull 1974, p. 80

Hull, D. L. (1974), Philosophy of Biological Science. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Ereshefsky, M. (1991), "The Semantic Approach to Evolutionary Theory," Biology and Philosophy 5: 7-28.

CK Waters. Causal regularities in the biological world of contingent distributions. Biology and philosophy, 1998

Scaling laws