The ontology of organisms: Mechanistic modules or patterned processes?

Abstract

Though the realm of biology has long been under the philosophical rule of the mechanistic magisterium, recent years have seen a surprisingly steady rise in the usurping prowess of process ontology. According to its proponents, theoretical advances in the contemporary science of evo-devo have afforded that ontology a particularly powerful claim to the throne: in that increasingly empirically confirmed discipline, emergently autonomous, higher-order entities are the reigning explanantia. If we are to accept the election of evo-devo as our best conceptualisation of the biological realm with metaphysical rigour, must we depose our mechanistic ontology for failing to properly "carve at the joints" of organisms? In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of that claim: not only can the theoretical benefits offered by a process ontology be had without it, they cannot be sufficiently grounded without the metaphysical underpinning of the very mechanisms which processes purport to replace. The biological realm, I argue, remains one best understood as under the governance of mechanistic principles.There"s no doubt that one of the most trending topics in the philosophy of science is the so-called "new mechanism" movement. In the philosophy of biology in particular, the movement is truly a metaphysics en vogue: it represents a conceptual schema which appears to more than adequately capture the framework within which a wide variety of empirical data is commonly interpreted, and within which the experimental practitioners of that field carry out their work. According to the new mechanists, the biological realm is a mechanical realm, and its denizens -organisms -are machines par excellence. And although it"s undeniably the case that biology is a science of mechanisms in one sense or another, the pertinent question at hand is whether and to what extent the particulars of this now popular ontology properly carve at the same joints that our best contemporary biological models do.If we"re going to answer that question, a plausible place to do so is within the conceptual remit of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), a research programme whose fruit has been the reliable delineation of the various ontogenically and evolutionarily salient modular sub-systems which compose the meta-systems we recognise as organisms. What we want to know then is whether the ontology of evodevo is an ontology of mechanisms -that is, whether our best model of the composition of organisms is one capable of being constructed mechanistically. One would think that, given the past successes of a broadly mechanistic characterisation of the biological realm, this is a question that is likely to cause very few any pause -but there has rather recently arisen a dissenting voice claiming that the ontology of organisms evo-devo presents us with is not -and indeed, cannot be -one of "entities and activities", but is rather one consisting of activities alone.According to "process ontology", the familiar entities which our scientific theories describe a...

What Is a Hologenomic Adaptation? Emergent Individuality and Inter-Identity in Multispecies Systems

“…In this paper, we have shown the utility of approaching pressing biological questions by appealing to metaphysical notions. Our approach follows a growing tendency in contemporary biological and philosophical research that consists in combining scientific practice with the use of the metaphysical discourse to clarify some scientific debates (Boogerd et al, 2005;Dupré, 2012Dupré, , 2015Mumford and Tugby, 2013;Guay and Pradeu, 2014;Austin, 2016Austin, , 2017Waters, 2017;Austin and Nuño de la Rosa, 2018;Nicholson and Dupré, 2018;Laplane et al, 2019;Triviño, 2019). Concretely, we have shown how approaching the concept of holobiont adaptation by appealing to the notions of emergence and inter-identity allows to shed light on some of the perceived issues in contemporary hologenome literature.…”

Realization in biology?

“…In this context, what requires explanation is robustness itself and "to account for robustness is to account for multiple realizability" (Austin 2016: 656; emphasis in the original). Thus, and to briefly respond to an objection raised by an anonymous reviewer, we believe that it remains to be shown that 'realization' and 'multiple realization' have managed to go beyond their mere descriptive function, including in those cases in which those terms are used in connection with the phenomena of concern to eco-evo-devo, as, for example, in Austin (2016) or in Love (2018). Neither Austin nor Love provide any indication of what they mean by 'realization', whether it is R F , R D or something entirely different, and until this is clarified, we can only reaffirm our suspicion that, as the key concepts of eco-evodevo find better and better explanations, 'realization' and 'multiple realization' will eventually be explained away.…”

Autopoiesis, biological autonomy and the process view of life

“…In this paper, I shall not directly argue for this claim even though it is not (yet) a popular one and has been met with explicit criticism in the mechanistic camp of philosophers of biology (Austin 2016). Assuming that some version of process ontology is indeed appropriate for biology, I shall instead address the question of whether the process ontological turn envisaged for biology and the philosophy of biology is actually compatible with the appeal to biological autonomy and autopoiesis common among the supporters of the non-reductionist stream of the systems biological turn.…”