Philosophy, who needs it? Philosophy of Biology Peter Godfrey-Smith (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; 2013) ISBN: 9780691140018

on what one wants those terms to mean, so disputes about them are semantic: but not merely so. Unpacking words and concepts is essential to understanding the natural phenomena to which they are meant to refer. As to Godfrey-Smith's little book, it provides an authoritative but easy starting place for readers of Current Biology who want to root out tacit philosophical commitments in their disciplines, and/or appreciate how thinking more deeply about how we think about what we do would benefit us all as scientists. Written for both " philosophy students and biologists interested in philosophical issues surrounding their work " , all but the first of its nine chapters explore currently active areas in philosophy of biology, most of which relate to types of active empirical research embraced by this journal. The first chapter succinctly recounts the history of biology, reminding us of the integrative power of the theory of evolution, especially as it has expanded to more enthusiastically embrace molecular and developmental biology and eliminate the last traces of teleological and vitalist thinking. The next chapter goes on to address 'laws', which biology is often disparaged (vis-à-vis physics) for lacking. " So what? " is one rejoinder: the astounding success of 20 th century biology indicates that we are doing something right. But Godfrey-Smith digs deeper into the distinction between necessarily true but abstract conditional statements (the laws of physics or the principle of natural selection), and historically contingent ('accidental') exception-prone regularities (for instance Mendel's so-called laws or molecular biology's 'Central Dogma'). That distinction may be one of degree not kind, and some regularities may be both — Mendel's laws are necessary for organisms with the reproductive machinery of contemporary sexual eukaryotes, but there did not have to be such organisms. And if one believes — as some do — that our universe and its mix of laws and constants are also contingent, comprising only one of many possible or actual realities, biology is not so different from physics after all. Perhaps to avoid such metatheory, many biologists deal in 'mechanisms' or 'models', the differences between which Godfrey-Smith parses delicately. It is the pursuit of such explanatory In September, I was privileged to be one of a very few card-carrying scientists at an event grandly called the " Calgary Summit of Philosophers of Science: Future Approaches for Philosophy of Biology. " Grand it was, with many of the …