✍ Scribed by María Pilar Jimenez Aleixandre
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Interest in the philosophy of science, as well as in other science studies, has increased among science educators in recent years. On the one hand, there is a recognition of common interests and problems that, for authors such as Duschl and Hamilton, could be interpreted in terms of a domain that would include both science education and philosophy of science, along with cognitive psychology. On the other hand, there is a broader view of educational objectives, including the development of skills about reasoning and argumentation, that calls for a framework based in sound philosophical foundations. As a result, more people in science education are experiencing the need to be acquainted with current trends in philosophy of science.
Among the writings from philosophers of science that could be relevant for our work, we can distinguish two broad groups: writings related to general issues and controversies; and writings related to particular disciplines, such as physics, earth sciences, or biology, as is the case with the book reviewed here. Of course, there is no neat division between these disciplines, as many works that focus on a particular field tackle broad problems, whereas many general philosophy of science books discuss instances from a specific discipline. What this means is that Philosophy of Biology is a book of particular interest not just for biology educators, but also for science educators whose background is not biology but who are interested in issues such as inference and the basis for it, the demarcation of genuine science from pseudoscience, determinism, or sociobiology.
Sober's book should be added to other interesting works coming from philosophers of the life sciences in the last several years, such as the works of David Hull (1974, 1988), Michael Ruse (1988), William Bechtel (1993), and Sober's (1991) previous book, Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution and Inference. This previous book contains, among other issues, a brilliant discussion of the distinction between observation and hypothesis, suggesting that the question of whether observations are "theory-laden" should be addressed as a matter of degree and not as a yes -no dichotomy.
Philosophy of Biology focuses on a theory that is central to current biology: the theory of evolution. As the author makes clear in the introduction, he believes that the philosophy of biology should grow out of biology. In line with such a perspective, the book is organized around biological concepts and problems, and not around philosophical "isms" or controversies. Nevertheless, the biological subjects discussed offer opportunities to examine philosophical issues such as reductionism, vitalism, and materialism, as well as the role of teleology, which can be generalized to other areas of biology and to some other areas of science in general. The book begins with a preliminary chapter about evolutionary theory followed by three parts. The first part is concerned with challenges to the theory from "without." One chapter discusses the logic of the creationist argument, which is then contrasted to the logic of the Darwinist hypothesis and the issue of science vs. nonscience.
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