Sahotra Sarkar, Molecular models of life: philosophical papers on molecular biology
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Sahotra Sarkar, Molecular models of life: philosophical papers on molecular biology MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005, xvi + 396 pp, (Hb) ISBN-10: 0262-19512-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-262-19512-6, $38.00; (Pb) ISBN-10: 0-262-69350-X, ISBN-13: 978-0-262-69350-9, $25.00 Daniel Sirtes
Accepted: 12 April 2007 / Published online: 5 June 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Sahotra Sarkar, who holds a double appointment in philosophy and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, is one of the most prolific authors in philosophy of biology and adjacent disciplines.1 His creativity and productiveness can be compared to Paul Feyerabend’s.2 However, the somewhat unfortunate selection of papers in Molecular Models of Life. Philosophical Papers on Molecular Biology seems to suggest two further similarities between their respective works, redundancy and mixed quality. This compilation of articles on the philosophy of molecular biology, of which all but one were previously published between 1988 and 2003, harbors such gems as a wonderful introduction into the reductionism debate, (chapter 2), a poignant critique of the information metaphor in biology (chapter 9) and very illuminating historical-philosophical treatises about directed mutations (chapter 12) and the rise and fall of the importance of genes in the last century (chapter 14). However, these must-reads are surrounded by superfluous truncated versions of these papers (chapters 4, 8, 11) and some papers with relatively few new insights, which will probably leave many readers unimpressed. The book is divided into four parts that order the papers into four major topics: reduction, function, information, and evolution. The first paper of the reduction section (chapter 2) is both a historical and systematic analysis of the reductionism debate. Sarkar classifies different models of reduction, i.e. different views of what a successful reduction would amount to, into three categories of reductionism: Theory reduction, explanatory reduction, and constitutive reduction. If a model of reduction is construed as a relation between theories, it falls under theory reduction. If it is construed as a form of explanation, it is in the explanatory reduction category. And 1
Rumor has it that Sarkar works at any given time on forty different papers simultaneously.
2
See Oberheim (1999) for a full bibliography of Feyerabend’s works.
D. Sirtes (&) Science Studies Program, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 21, CH-4003 Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
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Acta Biotheor (2007) 55:91–94
if reduction involves the ontological claim that higher-level phenomena are consistent with or constituted by lower-level phenomena, it can be called constitutive reduction. This kind of disambiguation, although not new,3 is a very helpful tool for readers interested in an introduction to the topic. Sarkar explicates eight different models of reduction, in a concise and lucid way, and orders them into the respective categories. (Only the classic Nagelian model of t
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