Scientific Discovery and Inference: Between the Lab and Field in Biology
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Scientific Discovery and Inference: Between the Lab and Field in Biology Emily Grosholz1 · Tano Posteraro1 · Alex Grigas1
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract An adequate account of how inferences and discoveries are made in modern biology is a difficult prospect for a philosopher. Do we really deduce conclusions from Darwin’s principles? Once Darwinian biology is integrated with molecular biology, can we deduce the organism from its DNA? What does induction look like in an era where data sets are often too large to be processed by a human being? What is the role of abductive explanatory claims that try to define the biological individual in relation to the microbiome with which it may be associated, or to revise the notion of evolution when the interaction of organism and environment comes to seem much more complex than earlier generations imagined. How should we evaluate “origins of life” experiments conducted in the laboratory, where chemistry shifts to biology and we try to recreate early conditions on earth to which we have no empirical access? How are the carefully controlled conditions in the lab to be brought into productive relationship with the messy, contingent outdoor work of biologists in the field, studying crabs or eelgrass at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, or prairie plants at the end of woods, on the plains of the Midwest. To answer these questions, I sent my graduate student Tano Posteraro to work with Ted Grosholz, a marine biologist at the University of California / Davis, and my undergraduate student Alex Grigas to work with Ruth Geyer Shaw, a population geneticist at the University of Minnesota. They came back with complex and interesting answers to these questions. Keywords Philosophy of Science · Holobiont · Evolution · Ecology · Population genetics · Aster Models
1 Introduction: Sending Philosophy Students to Work with Scientists When I teach philosophy of science, at the introductory level, or at a higher level where my class is a mix of undergraduates and graduate students, we usually begin with the example of Newton’s solution of the two-body problem in Proposition XI, Book I of the Principia, a book that changed the world. We study the way that his diagram and the attendant deductive proof combine Copernicus’ claim that the sun is at the center of the system, not the earth; Kepler’s claims that the trajectory of a planet (let us assume it is the earth) around the sun is an ellipse, not a circle, and that the planet does not proceed at a constant speed, but speeds up and slows down in accordance with the Law of Areas; Galileo’s analysis of free fall and his presentation of how to compose * Emily Grosholz [email protected] 1
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
motions—in this case, inertial motion and free fall; and Descartes’ correct account of inertial motion: straight line motion at a constant speed. Put all these insights together, and you can deduce the law that the force of gravity obeys: the inverse square law! T
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