Table Of ContentBeliefs and Biology
Also by Jennifer Trusted
FREE WILL AND RESPONSIBILITY
INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF KNOWLEDGE
INQUIRY AND UNDERSTANDING
MORAL PRINCIPLE AND SOCIAL VALUES
THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INFERENCE
PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
THE MYSTERY OF MATTER
Beliefs and Biology
Theories of Life and Living
Jennifer Trusted
Former Lecturer in Philosophy
Exeter University
Former Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science
Open University
© Jennifer Trusted 1996, 2003
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in hardcover 1996
First published in paperback (with additions) 2003 by
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ISBN 978-1-4039-1222-0 ISBN 978-0-230-59767-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230597679
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managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Trusted, Jennifer.
Beliefs and biology : theories of life and living / Jennifer Trusted.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Life (biology)—Philosophy. I. Title.
QH501.T735 1996
574’.01—dc20 96–5583
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
1 Primitive Beliefs, Classical Theories, Early Practices 1
2 From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: from
scholasticism to the study of nature 20
3 The Appeal to Physical Explanations 38
4 Interactions – Fact and Theory 53
5 Arguments and Counter-arguments: The Creation 75
6 Idealism and Materialism 100
7 Natural Selection and Progress 123
8 Secular Beliefs – Suppositions and Presuppositions 149
9 Molecular Biology and a New Teleology 178
Notes and References 190
Index 208
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Acknowledgements
I should like to acknowledge the very interesting material provided in
the Open University ‘Science and Belief’ Course Units for AMST 283
and A381 and in the accompanying anthologies. I should also like to
thank Professor O’Connor for very valuable advice in connection with
Ancient Greek philosophy and Aristotelian philosophy in particular. In
addition my thanks go to Mr Martin Davies for his perceptive and
critical comments, which have much improved the style and clarity of
the text.
Jennifer Trusted
Exeter
vii
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Preface
The purpose of this book is to show how biological inquiry has been
influenced by ethical, religious and philosophical beliefs as to the nature
of life and man’s place in the natural world. It follows that though, of
necessity, there are accounts of various investigations and explanatory
theories, these have been selected in order to illustrate my theme: there
is no intention to present a history of biology.
I suggest that ethical beliefs in particular have had a greater influ-
ence in biology than in other sciences, such as physics and chemistry,
and this because biology includes the study of ourselves. Human be-
ings are, and have always been, concerned with the moral principles
implicit in guiding their behaviour and supporting their social codes.
Of course, the approved moral principles have varied, but there is no
known human society that is uninterested in such questions and that
lacks moral awareness.1
Attitudes to non-human life are also coloured by ethical beliefs; today
we tend to think that, at least until the publication of Darwin’s The
Origin of Species in 1859, human beings were believed to be com-
pletely distinct from the rest of nature, but this is too simplistic a
view. The notion that all other living things, and in particular animals,
were automata and totally devoid of feeling and consciousness was
promulgated by Descartes (1596–1650) in the exposition of his mech-
anical world-view. He argued that the entire material cosmos, including
the natural world, was to be understood as a vast machine, in which
human beings were exceptional in being the only material creatures
capable of thought and of conscious control of their actions. But before
Descartes it was generally accepted that animals were sentient, and in
any case Descartes’s own views about animals were by no means widely
adopted, even by those who were prepared to accept his mechanistic
account of cause and effect in relation to physical events.
Many people both before and after Descartes thought that animals
might be held responsible for at least part of their behaviour and there
are graphic accounts of animals being brought to trial and savagely
punished for their ‘crimes’. Moreover, if we consider attitudes in the
very distant past we see that not only animals but also plants (es-
pecially trees) and even what we regard as inanimate nature – rivers
and mountains, for example – were held to be alive. They were thought
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