Rosenberg: reductionisme in een Darwinistisch kader

Referenties:

Rosenberg, Alexander, Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology, Chicago:University Of Chicago Press, 2006, 272 p. [Rosenberg 2006]

Boekbespreking: Weber, Bruce H., "Back to basics", Nature (2007) 445, p. 601.

Informatief extract:

"After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be anti-reductionists? With clarity and wit, Darwinian Reductionism navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with convincing analysis and timely evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—Rosenberg provides a philosophically sophisticated defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist."

[Book description op Amazone.com]

Editorial Reviews on Amazone.com (een aantal gerenomeerde filosofen van de biologie).
Review Elliot Sober :
"For most philosophers, reductionism is wrong because it denies the fact of multiple realizability. For most biologists, reductionism is wrong because it involves a commitment to genetic determinism. In this stimulating new book, Rosenberg reconfigures the problem. His Darwinian reductionism denies genetic determinism and it has no problem with multiple realizability. It captures what scientific materialism should have been after all along."—Elliot Sober, University of Wisconsin

Philip Kitcher :
"Alex Rosenberg has been thinking about reductionism in biology for a quarter of a century. His latest discussion is many-sided, informed, and informative—and extremely challenging."— Philip Kitcher, Columbia University

Kim Sterelny :
"Over the last twenty years and more, philosophers and theoretical biologists have built an antireductionist consensus about biology. We have thought that biology is autonomous without being spooky. While biological systems are built from chemical ones, biological facts are not just physical facts, and biological explanations cannot be replaced by physical and chemical ones. The most consistent, articulate, informed, and lucid skeptic about this view has been Alex Rosenberg, and Darwinian Reductionism is the mature synthesis of his alternative vision. He argues that we can show the paradigm facts of biology—evolution and development—are built from the chemical and physical, and reduce to them. Moreover, he argues, unpleasantly plausibly, that defenders of the consensus must slip one way or the other: into spookiness about the biological, or into a reduction program for the biological. People like me have no middle way. Bugger."—Kim Sterelny, author of Sex and Death

[editorial reviews on Amazone.com]

Creatieve commentaar:

Als men de zoektermen 'reductionism', 'molecular biology' ingeeft op Amozone, komt men automatisch uit bij dit boek terecht. Het staat natuurlijk ook in de referentielijst van Rosenberg 2007.

Hoewel het boek wordt aanbevolen door zijn collega-filosofen is Bruce Weber, een emiritus professor in de moleculaire biologie, niet zo positief over het boek. Het boek heb ik zelf niet kunnen raadplegen en voor mijn beoordeling zal ik dus beroep moeten doen op de bespreking in Nature.

"The emerging field of the philosophy of biology inherited the reductionist framework of logical empiricism. But as our knowledge of molecular biology deepened, many philosophers of biology, including David Hull, Philip Kitcher, Eliot Sober, Evelyn Fox-Keller and Paul Griffiths, saw that the reductionist approach faced serious problems."

Rosenberg plaatst zijn reductionisme volledig in een Darwinistisch kader, maar dit lijkt mij te simplistisch. De boekbespreking is boeiend en de auteur neemt een stelling in tegen Rosenberg, waarvan ik het vermoeden heb dat ze het best aansluit bij de huidige wetenschappelijke stand van zaken. De blunder waarvan de recensent nota maakt, vind ik wel erg opmerkelijk.

Ik citeer zijn laatste twee zinnen. "Research on emergent complexity is still a work in progress, but it may undercut Rosenberg's thesis by providing a fully naturalistic, non-reductionist account of emergence. Such a non-reductionist account would not be anti-reductionist in the sense Rosenberg uses the term, but would offer a 'why necessary' explanation of the emergent phenomena."

Ik zou het boek dus alleen maar kopen als ik in verband met dit onderwerp een opstel zou schrijven. Rosenberg is één van de belangrijkste reductionisten onder de huidige filosofen van de biologie en zijn standpunt is in dat opzicht onvermijdelijk in een academisch verantwoorde discussie. Interessant lijkt mij of hij repliek geeft op het artikel van Frost-Arnold.
Persoonlijk denk ik echter dat er betere en interessantere dingen te lezen zijn.