What is the Developmentalist Challenge?

Abstract

Kenneth C. Schaffner's paper is an important contribution to the literature on behavioral genetics and on genetics in general. Schaffner has a long record of injecting real molecular biology into philosophical discussions of genetics. His treatments of the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics (Schaffner 1967, 1969) first drew philosophical attention to the problems of detail that have fuelled both anti-reductionism (Hull 1974, Kitcher 1984) and more sophisticated models of theory reduction (Sarkar 1992, Schaffner 1993). An injection of molecular detail into discussions of genetics is particularly necessary at the present time, when so many philosophers seem happy to discuss the philosophical and ethical implications ofmolecularbiology using gene concepts derived fromevolutionarybiology (i.e., the ‘evolutionary gene concept’ of G.C Williams (Williams 1966, Dawkins 1982)). Schaffner has long advocated the view that the philosophy of biology should be more than the philosophy of evolution. This paper shows how radically a picture of gene action derived from molecular biology undercuts the popular picture associated with a more evolutionary view of genes as units of heredity or as ‘difference-makers’ mediated by the ‘black box’ of development (Sterelny and Kitcher 1988).

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