Schneer, and with philosophers Nelson Goodman, Bonnie Hubbard, and George
Geiger. (Geiger, my mentor at Antioch College, was the last student of John
Dewey and played with Lou Gehrig on the Columbia University baseball team,
thus embodying both my professional and avocational interests.)
In fact, and as a comment within the sociology of science, I would venture
that future historians might judge the numerous seminal (and published)
collaborations between evolutionary biologists and professional philosophers of
science as the most unusual and informative operational aspect of the
reconstruction of evolutionary theory in the late 20th century. Research scientists
tend to be a philistine lot, with organismic biologists perhaps at the head of this
particular pack (for we work with "big things" that we can see and understand at
our own scale. Thus, we suppose that we can afford to be more purely empirical in
our reliance on "direct" observation, and less worried about admittedly conceptual
problems of evaluating things too small or too fast to see). Most of us would scoff
at the prospect of working with a professional philosopher, regarding such an
enterprise as, at best, a pleasant waste of time and, at worst, an admission that our
own clarity of thought had become addled (or at least as a fear that our colleagues
would so regard our interdisciplinary collaboration).
And yet, the conceptual problems presented by theories based on causes
operating at several levels simultaneously, of effects propagated up and down, of
properties emerging (or not) at higher levels, of the interaction of random and
deterministic processes, and of predictable and contingent influence, have proven
to be so complex, and so unfamiliar to people trained in the simpler models of
causal flow that have served us well for centuries (see the next section on
Zeitgeist), that we have had to reach out to colleagues explicitly trained in rigorous
thinking about such issues. Thus, we learned, to our humbling benefit, that
conceptual muddles do not necessarily resolve themselves "automatically" just
because a smart person—namely one of us, trained as a scientist—finally decides
to apply some raw, naive brain power to the problem. Professional training in
philosophy does provide a set of tools, modes and approaches, not to mention a
feeling for common dangers and fallacies, that few scientists (or few "smart folks"
of any untrained persuasion) are likely to possess by the simple good fortune of
superior raw brainpower. (We might analogize this silly and vainglorious, although
regrettably common, belief to the more popular idea that great athletes should be
able to excel at anything physical by reason of their general bodily virtue—a myth
and chimaera that dramatically exploded several years ago when Michael Jordan
discovered that he could not learn to hit a curve ball, just because he excelled so
preeminently in basketball, and possessed the world's best athletic body in
general—for he ended up barely hitting over 0.200 in a full season of minor league
play. I do, however, honor and praise his persistence in staying the course and
taking his lumps.)
Indeed, I know of no other substantial conceptual advance in recent science so
abetted by the active collaboration of working scientists and professional
philosophers (thus obviating, for once, the perennial, and justified, complaint
Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 29