Physics and Astronomy Calendar

Biologists studying complex causal systems identify some factors as causes and treat other factors as background. For example, when geneticists explain biological phenomena, they often identify certain genes as the phenotypic causes and relegate other factors to the background. But many of the factors relegated to the background are causally necessary for the production of phenotypic traits, even traits at the molecular level such as the amino acid sequences in polypeptides. Critics have charged that because there is parity among causes, the privileging of genes reflects only reductionist bias, not a difference based in reality. The idea that there is an ontological parity among causes is related to a philosophical puzzle identified by John Stuart Mill: what, other than interests or biases, could possibly justify identifying some causes as the actual or operative ones, and other causes as mere background? The aim of my talk is to solve this conceptual puzzle. It turns out that my solution helps answer a seemingly unrelated philosophical question: what kind of causal generality matters in biology?