Can a reductionist be a pluralist?

Pluralism is often put forth as a counter-position to reductionism. In this essay, I argue that reductionism and pluralism are in fact consistent. I propose that there are several potential goals for reductions and that the proper form of a reduction should be considered in tandem with the goal that it aims to achieve. This insight provides a basis for clarifying what version(s) of reductionism are currently defended, for explicating the notion of a fundamental level of explanation, and for showing how one can be both a reductionist and a pluralist.     

From humanized mice to human disease: guiding extrapolation from model to target

Extrapolation from a well-understood base population to a less-understood target population can fail if the base and target populations are not sufficiently similar. Differences between laboratory mice and humans, for example, can hinder extrapolation in medical research. Mice that carry a partial or complete human physiological system, known as humanized mice, are supposed to make extrapolation more reliable by simulating a variety of human diseases. But what justifies our belief that these mice are similar enough to their human counterparts to simulate human disease? I argue that, unless three requirements are met in the process of humanizing mice, very little does. My requirements are not meant to provide necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee a particular outcome. Instead, they serve as a heuristic for guiding scientific judgments involving extrapolation. In developing each requirement, I engage with philosophical issues concerning the nature of model-based science and the mechanistic approach (and its limits) to making generalizations in the life sciences.     

Do Organisms Exist?

What is the status of organisms in modern evolutionary biology?I argue that this is a question which centers on the questionof reduction, and towards a complete answer, I pursue issuesthrough three different senses of the term: ontological, methodological,and epistemological. The first sense refers to the ultimatestatus of the entities of the organic world, and in this senseI argue that organisms have no special status. The second senserefers to the question of organization, and I argue that inthe light of modern evolutionary biology organisms do have adistinctive "design-like" organization. The third sense refersto the relationship between theories, in particular to whetherthe theories of the biological sciences can be shown to be logicalconsequences of the theories of the physical sciences. I arguethat such reduction may be possible in principle but difficultin practice. However, from the perspective of the working scientist,this hardly matters. In conclusion, I argue that in some respectsorganisms are not distinctive and in other respects they are.Certainly biologists need not worry for the autonomy of theirsubject.     

Evolutionary game theory,interpersonal comparisons and natural selection: a dilemma

When social scientists began employing evolutionary game theory (EGT) in their disciplines, the question arose what the appropriate interpretation of the formal EGT framework would be. Social scientists have given different answer, of which I distinguish three basic kinds. I then proceed to uncover the conceptual tension between the formal framework of EGT, its application in the social sciences, and these three interpretations. First, I argue that EGT under the biological interpretation has a limited application in the social sciences, chiefly because strategy replication often cannot be sensibly interpreted as strategy bearer reproduction in this domain. Second, I show that alternative replication mechanisms imply interpersonal comparability of strategy payoffs. Giving a meaningful interpretation to such comparisons is not an easy task for many social situations, and thus limits the applicability of EGT in this domain. Third, I argue that giving a new interpretation both to strategy replication and selection solves the issue of interpersonal comparability, but at the costs of making the new interpretation incompatible with natural selection interpretations of EGT. To the extent that social scientists seek such a natural selection interpretation, they face a dilemma: either face the challenge that interpersonal comparisons pose, or give up on the natural selection interpretation. By identifying these tensions, my analysis pleas for greater awareness of the specific purposes of EGT modelling in the social sciences, and for greater sensitivity to the underlying microstructure on which the evolutionary dynamics and other EGT solution concepts supervene.     

On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures

This article argues for a new anthropology of the life course, one founded in indeterminacy and innovation. The fact that vital life events are rarely coherent, clear in direction, or fixed in outcome dramatically limits the usefulness of the life cycle model. In its place, I propose a unit of social analysis based in aspiration rather than event. I call this the vital conjuncture—integrating the "vital" of demographic vital events with Bourdieu's conception of the conjuncture of structure and action. Vital conjunctures suggest a new way of aggregating life history experiences and thus working between the individual and the social, free from the stultifying assumption of Stapes de vie. To illustrate the usefulness of the concept of "vital conjuncture, I focus on motherhood among young, educated Beti women in southern Cameroon. I demonstrate that rather than a clear threshold into female adulthood, here motherhood is a loosely bounded, fluid status. Contrary both to folk intuition and to the assumptions of a life cycle framework, Beti motherhood is not a stable status. Beti women who have borne children are not necessarily mothers, at least not all the time. Motherhood, instead, constitutes a temporary social status, an agent position that can be inhabited in specific forms of social action. The material offers perhaps an extreme example of what I argue is a more general phenomenon: "life stages" emerge only as the result of institutional projects, their coherence should be an object, rather than an assumption, of ethnographic inquiry. [Keywords: life course, Africa, demography, vital conjuncture]     

Creating parts that allow for rational design: Synthetic biology and the problem of context-sensitivity

The parts-based engineering approach in synthetic biology aims to create pre-characterised biological parts that can be used for the rational design of novel functional systems. Given the context-sensitivity of biological entities, a key question synthetic biologists have to address is what properties these parts should have so that they give a predictable output even when they are used in different contexts. In the first part of this paper I will analyse some of the answers that synthetic biologists have given to this question and claim that the focus of these answers on parts and their properties does not allow us to tackle the problem of context-sensitivity. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that we might have to abandon the notions of parts and their properties in order to understand how independence in biology could be achieved. Using Robert Cummins’ account of functional analysis, I will then develop the notion of a capacity and its condition space and show how these notions can help to tackle the problem of context-sensitivity in biology.     

Mechanisms,malfunctions and explanation in medicine

Mechanisms are a way of explaining how biological phenomena work rather than why single elements of biological systems are there. However, mechanisms are usually described as physiological entities, and little or no attention is paid to malfunction as an independent theoretical concept. On the other hand, malfunction is the main focus of interest of applied sciences such as medicine. In this paper I argue that malfunctions are parts of pathological mechanisms, which should be considered separate theoretical entities, conceptually having a priority over physiological sequences. While pathological mechanisms can be described in terms of a Cummins-like mechanistic explanation, they show some unnoticed peculiarities when compared to physiological ones. Some features of pathological mechanisms are considered, such as outcome variability, ambivalence and dependence on a range.     

A new genetics or an epiphenomenon? Variations in the discourse of epigenetics researchers

Epigenetics is a field on the rise that seeks to explain phenotypic variance despite a stable and enduring DNA sequence. The hopes for the field are high, and claims about its revolutionary potential abound. Some scholars in the humanities and social sciences see the field as potentially replacing reductionism and genetic determinism, bringing social life and environment more firmly into view. This paper attends to the discourses of epigenetics researchers themselves. Through qualitative interviewing and analysis, I classify these scientists into three groups based on the claims they make about the impact and future of their field: champions, those who take the middle ground, and skeptics. The variance in discourse about epigenetics suggests a far more complex and contested trajectory for the field, one that may or may not support anti-deterministic views.     

How to be an anti-reductionist about developmental biology: Response to Laubichler and Wagner

Alexander Rosenberg recently claimed (1997) that developmental biology is currently being reduced to molecular biology. cite several concrete biological examples that are intended to impugn Rosenberg's claim. I first argue that although Laubichler and Wagner's examples would refute a very strong reductionism, a more moderate reductionism would escape their attacks. Next, taking my cue from the antireductionist's perennial stress on the importance of spatial organization, I describe one form an empirical finding that refutes this moderate reductionism would take. Finally, I point out an actual example, anterior-posterior axis determination in the chick, that challenges the reductionist's belief that all developmental regularities can be explained by molecular biology. In short, I argue that Rosenberg's position can be saved from Laubichler and Wagner's criticisms and putative counter-examples, but it would not survive a different kind of counter-example.     

Reconstructionist molecular biology

In the editorial inaugurating this journal, Levine (1989) pointed to a new reductionism in biology, which--unlike the old reductionism that led to specialization and isolation of areas concerned with different aspects of a complex biological problem--is providing a renewed sense of unity. This development is the result of widespread use of common experimental methodology and the emergence of signal transmission and differential gene expression as themes that are central to many areas of modern biology. I describe here a set of complementary developments in molecular biology that focus attention on the problems of complexity and organization. Simple examples are given that illustrate the difficulty of relating systemic behavior to the properties of the underlying molecular determinants, and the outlines of a general approach to this problem are presented. These developments, together with those highlighted by Levine, are leading us to a new, more integrative intellectual paradigm whose fruits will be the elucidation of fundamental issues concerning network function, design, and evolution that cannot be addressed by the current paradigm.     

Subjects of Speculation: Emergent Life Sciences and Market Logics in the United States and India

This article traces systems of exchange concerning the life sciences and capital and how they configure subjectivity in the United States and India. This is done through case studies concerning the emergence of personalized medicine in the two locales. In the U.S. case, I argue for the configuration of the subjects of personalized medicine as sovereign consumers; in the Indian case, I argue for their configuration as experimental subjects. I situate these arguments in the context of epistemologies of genomics and the consolidation of systems of speculative capitalism.     

When love meets drugs: pharmaceuticalizing ambivalence in post-socialist China

In this article, I examine the interaction between intimacy and psychiatry to explore the ambivalences in the use of pharmaceuticals in psychiatric practice. Of particular interest is how pharmaceuticals come to constitute in multiple ways what pathology is and what form of life needs to be restored, and how psychiatric medications reconfigure the ambivalence of intimacy in post-socialist China. Following the life of Mei, a female psychiatric patient, for two years, I have made a series of discoveries related to medicine and intimacy in China. Specifically, I show that psychopharmaceuticals indicate a diseased body that threatens the intimate bond. They also highlight a socially suffering subject that is in lack of love from the intimate partner who demands the latter’s redemption. I discuss how these multiple and contradicting meanings of psychopharmaceuticals and intimacy are socio-historically situated. Thus, while previous research in medical anthropology criticizes pharmaceuticalization for reducing the socio-political life (bios) to a biological body (zoē), I argue that these life forms co-exist in a pharmaceutical “zone of indistinction” (Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998), in which they constitute and contradict each other. This discussion warns researchers against falling back into the usual orientation of either biomedicine or the social sciences.     

Anthropology and emotion

The centrality of emotion in thought and action is increasingly recognized in the human sciences, though basic questions of definition and scope remain unresolved. Where do emotions begin and end? How should we identify and analyse them? How should we write about them? Ethnographic fieldwork, as pioneered by Malinowski, offers powerful insights into the place of emotion in social life; but emotions are peculiarly difficult to capture in the generalizing format of case study and ethnographic summary. In this article I argue that semantic, structural, and discourse‐based approaches tend to miss what is most important – what counts for the persons concerned and therefore what makes the emotion. I review the conceptual and methodological issues and conclude that only a narrative approach can capture both the particularity and the temporal dimension of emotion, restoring verisimilitude and fidelity to experience.     

Redefining community: towards an ecological republicanism

This paper makes some suggestions for a concept of community which arguably satisfies the most important criteria for both human communities, as defined in the social sciences and humanities, and natural communities, as defined in ecology and biology. Beginning with the former, I arrive at two such criteria: (1) a material and social connection among members, and (2) some kind and degree of awareness of other members. These are then supplemented with a third drawn from civic republicanism, with its focus on citizenship and the common good: communities (3) enable and require certain practices for their maintainence. Turning to ecological definitions of community, I find the dominant (reductionist) one seriously deficient as compared with a more holist and ecosystemic approach. However, I invoke a nonreductive holism to defend the idea of community, and go on to argue that each of the three above-mentioned criteria can be fruitfully extended to include both social and ecological communities in a nonreductionist way – that is, in a way that neither reduces ecosystemic properties to individual organisms nor the reverse. This culminates in a discussion of what I call ecological republicanism, which I suggest could have powerfully positive effects on the contemporary crisis of undue human impact on the natural world.     

Negotiating “The Social” and Managing Tuberculosis in Georgia

In this paper I utilize anthropological insights to illuminate how health professionals and patients navigate and negotiate what for them is social about tuberculosis in order to improve treatment outcomes and support patients as human beings. I draw on ethnographic research about the implementation of the DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy, Short Course) approach in Georgia’s National Tuberculosis Program in the wake of the Soviet healthcare system. Georgia is a particularly unique context for exploring these issues given the country’s rich history of medical professionalism and the insistence that the practice of medicine is a moral commitment to society. I argue for critical attention to the ways in which treatment recipients and providers navigate what, for them, is “social” about therapeutic practices and their significance for avoiding biological and social reductionism.     

A unifying explanation for diverse metabolic scaling in animals and plants

The scaling of metabolic rate with body mass has long been a controversial topic. Some workers have claimed that the slope of log-log metabolic scaling relationships typically obeys a universal 3/4-power law resulting from the geometry of resource-transport networks. Others have attempted to explain the broad diversity of metabolic scaling relationships. Although several potentially useful models have been proposed, at present none successfully predicts the entire range of scaling relationships seen among both physiological states and taxonomic groups of animals and plants. Here I argue that our understanding may be aided by three shifts in focus: from explaining average tendencies to explaining variation between extreme boundary limits, from explaining the slope and elevation (metabolic level) of scaling relationships separately to showing how and why they are interrelated, and from focusing primarily on internal factors (e.g. body design) to a more balanced consideration of both internal and external (ecological) factors. By incorporating all of these shifts in focus, the recently proposed metabolic-level boundaries hypothesis appears to provide a useful way of explaining both taxonomic and physiological variation in metabolic scaling relationships. This hypothesis correctly predicts that the scaling slope should vary mostly between 2/3 and 1 and that it should be related to metabolic (activity) level according to an approximately U-shaped function. It also implies that the scaling of other energy-dependent biological processes should be related to the metabolic level of the organisms being examined. Some data are presented that support this implication, but further research is needed.     

There May be Strict Empirical Laws in Biology, after All

This paper consists of four parts. Part 1 is an introduction. Part 2 evaluates arguments for the claim that there are no strict empirical laws in biology. I argue that there are two types of arguments for this claim and they are as follows: (1) Biological properties are multiply realized and they require complex processes. For this reason, it is almost impossible to formulate strict empirical laws in biology. (2) Generalizations in biology hold contingently but laws go beyond describing contingencies, so there cannot be strict laws in biology. I argue that both types of arguments fail. Part 3 considers some examples of biological laws in recent biological research and argues that they exemplify strict laws in biology. Part 4 considers the objection that the examples in part 3 may be strict laws but they are not distinctively biological laws. I argue that given a plausible account of what distinctively biological means, such laws are distinctively biological.     

Negotiating Values: Narrative and Exposition

In this paper I focus on the limits of narrative by asking what kinds of things narratives do, and what kinds of texts do related things in other ways. In particular I focus on how narrative genres organise time in relation to value, drawing on functional linguistic models of temporality and evaluation. From a linguistic perspective, the various narrative genres negotiate different kinds of solidarity with listeners, and so the limits of narrative materialise various possibilities for communing in a culture, alongside the potentialities for construing community through related and other genres of discourse—since in general, the limits/possibilities of our language (and attendant modalities of communication) are the limits/possibilities of our social world.

HOW TO CONNECT BIOETHICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: HEALTH, SUSTAINABILITY, AND JUSTICE

In this paper, I explore one way to bring bioethics and environmental ethics closer together. I focus on a question at the interface of health, sustainability, and justice: How well does a society promote health with the use of no more than a just share of environmental capacity? To address this question, I propose and discuss a mode of assessment that combines a measurement of population health, an estimate of environmental sustainability, and an assumption about what constitutes a fair or just share. This mode of assessment provides an estimate of the just and sustainable life expectancy of a population. It could be used to monitor how well a particular society promotes health within just environmental limits. It could also serve as a source of information that stakeholders use when they deliberate about programs, policies, and technologies. The purpose of this work is to focus attention on an ethical task: the need to fashion institutions and forms of life that promote health in ways that recognize the claims of sustainability and justice.