Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them

There is an old attempt to divide the sciences into sciences of laws and the historical sciences. More recently, John Beatty has drawn the distinction so that biology is a historical science and urged that there are no genuinely biological laws. This paper shows that there are indeed biological laws...

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Autor principal: Creath, Richard
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023
Materias:
Original Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9925592/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36682024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12064-023-00384-2
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author Creath, Richard
author_facet Creath, Richard
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description There is an old attempt to divide the sciences into sciences of laws and the historical sciences. More recently, John Beatty has drawn the distinction so that biology is a historical science and urged that there are no genuinely biological laws. This paper shows that there are indeed biological laws, specifically statistical ones, notably in evolutionary theory. Moreover, all or almost all other areas of biology involve laws as well. Even history involves laws. Finally, the paper shows that this pervasiveness of laws is compatible with the most basic commitments of those who, like Beatty, would claim that biology is only historical.
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spelling pubmed-99255922023-02-15 Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them Creath, Richard Theory Biosci Original Article There is an old attempt to divide the sciences into sciences of laws and the historical sciences. More recently, John Beatty has drawn the distinction so that biology is a historical science and urged that there are no genuinely biological laws. This paper shows that there are indeed biological laws, specifically statistical ones, notably in evolutionary theory. Moreover, all or almost all other areas of biology involve laws as well. Even history involves laws. Finally, the paper shows that this pervasiveness of laws is compatible with the most basic commitments of those who, like Beatty, would claim that biology is only historical. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023-01-22 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC9925592/ /pubmed/36682024 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12064-023-00384-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Original Article
Creath, Richard
Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
title Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
title_full Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
title_fullStr Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
title_full_unstemmed Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
title_short Biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
title_sort biology as involving laws and inconceivable without them
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9925592/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36682024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12064-023-00384-2
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