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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2001 52(4):735-760; doi:10.1093/bjps/52.4.735
© 2001 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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How is Biological Explanation Possible?

Alex Rosenberg1

1 Department of Philosophy, Box 90743, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 27708, USA. alexrose{at}duke.edu

That biology provides explanations is not open to doubt. But how it does so must be a vexed question for those who deny that biology embodies laws or other generalizations with the sort of explanatory force that the philosophy of science recognizes. The most common response to this problem has involved redefining law so that those grammatically general statements which biologists invoke in explanations can be counted as laws. But this terminological innovation cannot identify the source of biology's explanatory power. I argue that because biological science is historical, the problem of biological explanation can be assimilated to the parallel problem in the philosophy of history, and that the problem was solved by Carl Hempel. All we need to do is recognize that the only laws that biology—in all its compartments from the molecular onward—has or needs are the laws of natural selection.


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