Event:

This talk asks what, if anything, is distinctive about the biological sciences? A number of possible answers to this question are examined, drawing on recent and not so recent discussions in the philosophy of science. One popular answer is that the biosciences are distinguished by the fact that their objects of study have evolved by a Darwinian process, unlike the physical sciences; this means that biologists need to ask ’why questions’ of a sort that would make little sense in relation to physics. A different answer starts from the observation that the picture of science painted by the traditional logical empiricists does not fit the biological sciences very well; this may because biology does not have ’laws of nature’ of its own, and so must explain phenomena in a fundamentally different way to other sciences. Both of these answers are critically examined.