Table Of Content

Beliefs and Biology Also by Jennifer Trusted FREE WILL AND RESPONSIBILITY INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE INQUIRY AND UNDERSTANDING MORAL PRINCIPLE AND SOCIAL VALUES THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INFERENCE PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS THE MYSTERY OF MATTER Beliefs and Biology Theories of Life and Living Jennifer Trusted Former Lecturer in Philosophy Exeter University Former Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science Open University © Jennifer Trusted 1996, 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in hardcover 1996 First published in paperback (with additions) 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-1222-0 ISBN 978-0-230-59767-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230597679 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Trusted, Jennifer. Beliefs and biology : theories of life and living / Jennifer Trusted. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Life (biology)—Philosophy. I. Title. QH501.T735 1996 574’.01—dc20 96–5583 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Contents Acknowledgements vii Preface ix 1 Primitive Beliefs, Classical Theories, Early Practices 1 2 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: from scholasticism to the study of nature 20 3 The Appeal to Physical Explanations 38 4 Interactions – Fact and Theory 53 5 Arguments and Counter-arguments: The Creation 75 6 Idealism and Materialism 100 7 Natural Selection and Progress 123 8 Secular Beliefs – Suppositions and Presuppositions 149 9 Molecular Biology and a New Teleology 178 Notes and References 190 Index 208 v This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements I should like to acknowledge the very interesting material provided in the Open University ‘Science and Belief’ Course Units for AMST 283 and A381 and in the accompanying anthologies. I should also like to thank Professor O’Connor for very valuable advice in connection with Ancient Greek philosophy and Aristotelian philosophy in particular. In addition my thanks go to Mr Martin Davies for his perceptive and critical comments, which have much improved the style and clarity of the text. Jennifer Trusted Exeter vii This page intentionally left blank Preface The purpose of this book is to show how biological inquiry has been influenced by ethical, religious and philosophical beliefs as to the nature of life and man’s place in the natural world. It follows that though, of necessity, there are accounts of various investigations and explanatory theories, these have been selected in order to illustrate my theme: there is no intention to present a history of biology. I suggest that ethical beliefs in particular have had a greater influ- ence in biology than in other sciences, such as physics and chemistry, and this because biology includes the study of ourselves. Human beings are, and have always been, concerned with the moral principles implicit in guiding their behaviour and supporting their social codes. Of course, the approved moral principles have varied, but there is no known human society that is uninterested in such questions and that lacks moral awareness.1 Attitudes to non-human life are also coloured by ethical beliefs; today we tend to think that, at least until the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, human beings were believed to be com- pletely distinct from the rest of nature, but this is too simplistic a view. The notion that all other living things, and in particular animals, were automata and totally devoid of feeling and consciousness was promulgated by Descartes (1596–1650) in the exposition of his mech- anical world-view. He argued that the entire material cosmos, including the natural world, was to be understood as a vast machine, in which human beings were exceptional in being the only material creatures capable of thought and of conscious control of their actions. But before Descartes it was generally accepted that animals were sentient, and in any case Descartes’s own views about animals were by no means widely adopted, even by those who were prepared to accept his mechanistic account of cause and effect in relation to physical events. Many people both before and after Descartes thought that animals might be held responsible for at least part of their behaviour and there are graphic accounts of animals being brought to trial and savagely punished for their ‘crimes’. Moreover, if we consider attitudes in the very distant past we see that not only animals but also plants (es- pecially trees) and even what we regard as inanimate nature – rivers and mountains, for example – were held to be alive. They were thought ix