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What Is Wrong with Typological Thinking?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Tim Lewens
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Abstract

What, if anything, is wrong with typological thinking? The question is important, for some evolutionary developmental biologists appear to espouse a form of typology. I isolate four allegations that have been brought against it. They include the claim that typological thinking is mystical; the claim that typological thinking is at odds with the fact of evolution; the claim that typological thinking is committed to an objectionable metaphysical view, which Elliott Sober calls the ‘natural state model’; and finally the view (endorsed by Ron Amundson and Günter Wagner) that typological thinking—and specifically evolutionary developmental biology's typological thinking—is committed to a peculiar form of causation that does not fit neatly into the causal models endorsed by population genetics. I argue that, properly understood, the typological thinking of evolutionary developmental biology does not run into any of these problems.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 355 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

A much shorter ‘abstract’ of this paper has appeared as Lewens 2009. I am grateful to audiences at the IHPST (Paris), the University of Leeds, and the University of Cambridge, where earlier versions of this article were presented. I am also grateful to Günther Wagner and Roberta Millstein for comments. Finally, I am grateful to the IHPST (Paris), for accepting me as a visitor while this work was being completed. This work was supported by grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust.

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