![]() I found John’s book compelling not just because of his refreshing, and admittedly consciously iconoclastic tone, but also because a great deal of it is devoted to subject matters, like population genetics, that I actually know a lot about, and am therefore in a good position to judge whether the philosopher got it right (mostly, he did).ĭupré’s strategy in The Disorder of Things is to attack the idea of reductionism by showing how it doesn’t work in biology. ![]() Then I read John Dupré’s The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science, and that got me to pause and think (which, of course, is the hallmark of a good book, regardless if one rejects that book’s conclusions). More importantly, though I am a biologist, I automatically accepted the physicists’ idea that - in principle at the least - everything boils down to physics, that it makes perfect sense to go after a “theory of everything.” As a practicing scientist I have always assumed that there is one thing, one type of activity, we call science. ![]()
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