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Topic description / abstract:
Over the course of forty years or more Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin repeatedly and steadfastly advocated for a ‘dialectical biology’. The defining characteristic of dialectical biology is its emphasis on ‘interpenetration’—of part and whole, organism and environment, cause and effect, subject and object—in contradistinction to the ‘alienation’ between these dyads that Levins and Lewontin perceive to be a consequence of conventional mechanism. While Levins and Lewontin explicitly lay out the precepts of dialectical biology, they say little about what the biological world must be like in order for this methodology to be the appropriate way to study it. As a way of filling this gap, I argue that organisms are ecological agents. As such they encounter the world from a perspective. This perspective inaugurates a new realm of facts, neither subjective nor objective, but ‘constitutively perspectival’. I argue that the ‘constitutively perspectival’ is what Levins and Lewontin mean by ‘interpenetration’. It is this crucial feature of biological systems that is opaque to conventional mechanism and uniquely accommodated by the methods of dialectical biology. Ecological agency thus provides a metaphysics for dialectical biology.
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Biographical note:
I am a philosopher of science, primarily of biology, working at the University of Toronto. I received a PhD in evolutionary biology from McGill University in Montreal, and a PhD in Philosophy from Kings College London. Over the years I have worked extensively on the nature of explanation in biology. I formulated and defended what became known as the „statistical interpretation“ of population dynamics models. I have worked extensively on the understanding of naturalised teleology and its role in evolutionary biology. Since 2012, I have been researching the concept of agency as it applies to evolutionary biology. In particular, I have articulated and defended the „ecological account“ of agency. In 2015 I published Organisms, Agency, and Evolution (Cambridge University Press), (a significant part of which was written while on various visits to KLI). In 2018-2019 I was fellow at the Institute for Advance Study, Paris (and FMSH). I have taught at LSE, University of Edinburgh, Dartmouth College, MIT, and University of Toronto..
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The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) is an independent center of advanced studies in the life sciences, supporting research in theoretical biology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, and the philosophy of science.
Many projects at the KLI have focused on understanding the interaction of different organizational levels of life, such as evolutionary, ecological, developmental, sociocultural, and cognitive dynamics. The institute also fosters critical engagement with the conceptual, historical, and societal dimensions of the life sciences.
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