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Laws of biological design: a reply to John Beatty

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Abstract

In this paper, I argue against John Beatty’s position in his paper “The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis” by counterexample. Beatty argues that there are no distinctly biological laws because the outcomes of the evolutionary processes are contingent. I argue that the heart of the Caspar–Klug theory of virus structure—that spherical virus capsids consist of 60T subunits (where T = k 2 + hk + h 2 and h and k are integers)—is a distinctly biological law even if the existence of spherical viruses is evolutionarily contingent.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Beatty does acknowledge the rule-making ability of natural selection, but does not consider any of these rules made to be biological laws.

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Acknowledgements

I thank audiences at the International Union of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science Congress in Beijing in August 2007, Michael Ruse’s Weikmeister Workshop in March 2008, the Philosophy of Science Association Meeting in Pittsburgh in November 2008, and Stevens Institute of Technology in February 2009 for their questions. In particular, I thank Lisa Dolling, Michael Steinmann, Garry Dobbins, John Horgan, Suzanne Willis, Chris Dodsworth, Michael Ruse, Dick Burian, John Beatty, Lindley Darden, Christopher Smeenk, Todd Grantham, Roger Sansom, Partick Byrne, Alan Love, Kim Sterelny and an anonymous reviewer for their criticism and suggestions.

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  1. Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Gregory J. Morgan

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Correspondence to Gregory J. Morgan.

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Morgan, G.J. Laws of biological design: a reply to John Beatty. Biol Philos 25, 379–389 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9181-y

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