A Minimalist Approach to Design in Biology

Fabricio Carvalho

University College London

In biology, functional statements are usually linked to teleological terms such as purpose, goal or design. To explain this connection, Ratti & Germain defend that function-talk retained the treatment of organisms “as if they were designed objects” as a relic from early physiological practices. However, after Darwin, they argue this treatment is contradicted by our knowledge that teleology is not a real feature of the world, and so it can only distortedly represent biological processes. Ratti & Germain, thus, propose that teleological design alongside all function-talk should be eliminated from biology. My work develops a case for a minimalist approach to design in parallel with an analysis of the arguments from their eliminative proposal. Rather than a relic, notions of design have evolved alongside the uptake of mechanistic and evolutionary explanatory elements in biology. This process undermines the eliminative proposal, as there is no generalised ontological commitment across the historical naturalisation of biology that would justify the thorough elimination of teleological re-conceptualizations. By contrast, the claim that design can distort biological reasoning must be taken seriously. I defend that design has become a path-dependent feature of functional statements, persisting even when not necessarily presenting the heuristic benefits it once did. In this sense, its excessive influence can be problematic, as examined in case studies for (1) the controversy surrounding the use of functional propositions by members of the ENCODE project, and (2) the limited nature of the metaphorical treatment of organisms as artefacts when it comes to encapsulating the complexity of the phenomena studied in developmental biology. Therefore, I argue for a minimalist scrutiny to teleological design: one that supports biologists in assessing whether it has retained its heuristic value, thereby confronting its indiscriminate employment in function-talk.

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