Biological and Cultural Proper Functions in Comparative Perspective 45
applicable for all biological organisms, either, so we can safely ignore it. On the
other hand, fertility and fecundity—the capacities to produce offspring and lots of them,
respectively—do seem to have analogues in material culture. With regard to fertility,
some prototype artifacts are reproduced while others are discarded or are used only
by their maker. There are a variety of reasons for this. Some prototypes do not work
as expected; others work well enough but are intended for some idiosyncratic purpose
not shared by others; and reproduction in other cases depends on factors extraneous to
proper function, such as aesthetic considerations, legal restrictions, or marketing con-
straints. With regard to fecundity, there are indeed differential rates of reproduction among
artifacts. For example, there always seem to be a lot more chocolate cakes than red velvet
cakes, and in that sense chocolate cakes are more “fecund.” Here again, a variety of reasons
may be operative, not all of which have to do directly with function. Red velvet cakes and
chocolate cakes both serve the dessert function equally well, but chocolate is a preferred
fl avor in contemporary Western culture, and chocolate cakes are consequently more
“fecund.”
But these analogies are vague. Fertility and fecundity in biology are properties
of individual organisms that singly or in pairs directly give rise to offspring like
themselves. But the chocolate cake you are now baking is the offspring of the previous
one (or two) you baked only indirectly, and mediated by your baking activity, know-
how, and available raw materials. As Aristotle remarked, “... man is born from
man, but not bed from bed” (Physics 193b8–9). On the other hand, as Aristotle also
remarked:
Therefore it follows that in a sense health comes from health and house from house, that with matter
from that without matter; for the medical art and the building art are the form of health and of the
house, and when I speak of substance without matter I mean the essence. (Metaphysics
1032b11–14)
So the disanalogy is that the reproductive cycle of artifacts has an intermediate stage that
is lacking in biological organisms. It is, in an etymologically correct sense, a larval stage
in which the artifact exists in a distributed and partially mental, linguistic, or behavioral
form. (The Latin root lar refers to tutelary household deities, often identifi ed with the
spirits of dead ancestors.) For Aristotle, the larval form is the essence—or more precisely,
the formula of the essence—embodied in the art of producing the type of artifact in ques-
tion. This account may need adjustment—it is not just the building art that is required but
the existence and availability in the culture of suitable raw materials, for instance. But
whatever the larval stage involves, the important point for us is that factors present in it
affect the reproduction and reproductive rate of artifacts. This robs the analogy to biologi-
cal fertility and fecundity of cogency, because biological organisms do not have a larval
stage in this sense.