528 Tim Lewens
artefacts, and God was their designer. Richard Dawkins calls one of his books
The Blind Watchmaker[Dawkins, 1986] and in giving the book this title he makes
it clear that although he is opposed to Paley’s view that only intentional design
can explain the makeup of the natural world, he is not opposed to characterising
natural objects as akin to watches. Natural selection is blind, but the end result
is an organism whose parts are all well-designed for their roles. Similar appeal to
the artefact model, particularly in the conception of natural selection as an ersatz
designer, can be seen in Krebs and Davies’ rationale for attending to adaptive
‘problems’ in behavioural ecology:
Visitors from another planet would find it easier to discover how an
artificial object, such as a car, works if they first knew what it was
for. In the same way, physiologists are better able to analyse the
mechanisms underlying behaviour once they appreciate the selective
pressures which have influenced its function. [Krebs and Davies, 1997,
15]The tradition that flows from natural theology is what establishes the features of
biological discourse that a philosophical account of functions then seeks to preserve;
in the context of a different tradition, the desiderata of a theory of functions can
be different too.
If we begin by noting the differences between organisms and artefacts, rather
than their similarities, then we are likely to be tempted to construct a theory
of functions of the form suggested by the agent model. Kant and Aristotle, for
example, take pains to point out how unlike artefacts organisms are [Ginsborg,
2004]. Kant points out that an artefact is something that suggests to us a rationally
determined organisation, but when we see an organism, we are not merely put in
mind of a rationally ordered object. In Kant’s terms, an organism is also, in three
senses, ‘both cause and effect of itself’ [Kant, 1952, 18], and in these respects
organisms are unlike artefacts. Kant sees organisms as self-reproducing (trees
come from trees), self-realising (a tree grows by drawing in and synthesising its
own supply of nutrients), and self-dependent (each part of the tree depends for its
continued existence on the contributions of the other parts): in short, Kant says,
an organism is a ‘self-organised being’ [ibid., 22].
Whatever one thinks of the precise way in which Kant spells out these disanalo-
gies, it is clear that we observe very different modes of generation, maintenance
and repair in the natural and artificial worlds. What makes a whale is another pair
of whales; what makes a watch is a watchmaker. Watchmaking is a very delicate
business; the whole project may stall if a part is missing, or if the environment of
manufacture is disturbed. Whalemaking, on the other hand, is fairly resilient to
changes in developmental conditions. A whale is a self-maintaining entity; if its
environmental conditions change, then internal adjustments (of heart rate, for ex-
ample), can compensate for those changes and ensure an ongoing organic integrity.
Watches, on the other hand, are not so resilient, nor so resourceful. Divers’ watches
might sometimes remain in working order across changes in temperature and pres-