John Dupr¿xplores recent revolutionary developments in biology and considers their relevance for our understanding of human nature and society. He reveals how the advance of genetic science is changing our view of the constituents of life, and shows how an understanding of microbiology will overturn standard assumptions about the living world.

• Introduction


• I. Science


• 1: The Miracle of Monism


• 2: What's the Fuss about Social Constructivism?


• 3: The Inseparability of Science and Values


• II. Biology


• 4: The Constituents of Life 1: Species, Microbes and Genes


• 5: The Constituents of Life 2: Organisms and Systems


• 6: Understanding Contemporary Genomics


• 7: The Polygenomic Organism


• 8: It is not Possible to Reduce Biological Explanations to Explanations in Chemistry and/or Physics


• 9: Postgenomic Darwinism


• III. Microbes


• 10: (with Maureen O'Malley): Size Doesn't Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology


• 11: (with Maureen O'Malley): Metagenomics and Biological Ontology


• 12: (with Maureen O'Malley): Varieties of living things: Life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism


• 13: Emerging Sciences and New Conceptions of Disease: Or, Beyond the Monogenomic Differentiated Cell Lineage


• IV. Humans


• 14: Against Maladaptationism: or What's Wrong with Evolutionary Psychology


• 15: What Genes Are, and Why There Are No Genes for Race


• 16: Causality and Human Nature in the Social Sciences

John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter and, since 2002, Director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis). He has formerly held posts at Oxford, Stanford, and Birkbeck College, London. In 2006 he held the Spinoza Visiting Professorship at the University of Amsterdam. He is the President-Elect of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science and a member of the Council of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology.
John Dupré has worked on a wide variety of biological issues of interest to philosophy, including the nature of species, organisms, and genes, the implications of evolutionary theory, and lately on genomics and various related areas of molecular biology (epigenetics, microbiology, systems biology and synthetic biology). He has also contributed to philosophical discussions on topics of relevance to science, such as the nature of causation and the status of natural kinds.