The Philosophy of Social and Biological Sciences

The philosophy of biology emerged as a distinct and increasingly professionalized subfield from the 1970s onward, propelled substantially by the publication of David Hull's Philosophy of Biological Science (1974) and the founding of the journal Biology and Philosophy in 1986, and it has focused centrally on whether evolutionary theory possesses genuine, exceptionless "laws of nature" comparable to those of physics. Alexander Rosenberg and others have argued that biology is, in an important sense, a historically contingent and radically pluralistic science lacking the strict, universal laws physics possesses — even a claim as fundamental as natural selection's principle that fitter variants tend to increase in frequency admits of exceptions through genetic drift, small population effects, and environmental contingency — a debate substantially shaped by Elliott Sober's The Nature of Selection (1984), which analyzes natural selection itself as a statistical, population-level force akin in structure, though not in universality, to forces in classical mechanics.