# Biology Is About Processes, Not Things | John Dupré

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Closer To Truth
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXuXRk5VmWQ
- **Дата:** 02.06.2026
- **Длительность:** 11:09
- **Просмотры:** 1,308
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/51919

## Описание

*Why do living things stay the same at all?*

John Dupré argues that biology is not fundamentally about fixed substances or natural kinds, but about dynamic processes that maintain temporary stability amid constant change.

0:00 Philosophy and Biology Merge Into One Another
1:38 Why Biology Can Lose the Big Picture
4:49 The Metaphysics of Natural Kinds
6:06 Evolution Depends on Variability
7:48 Biology Is About Processes, Not Substances

*John Dupré* is a British philosopher of science. He is the director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, and professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter. Dupré's chief work area lies in philosophy of biology, philosophy of the social sciences, and general philosophy of science.

*More from John Dupré on Closer To Truth:*
* Philosophy of Biology: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJr3pJl27pI44Mgu6SGECQL2bKcE4dmc
* Closer To Truth contributor page: https://closertotruth.com/contributor/john-dupre/

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## Транскрипт

### Philosophy and Biology Merge Into One Another []

John, I have loved philosophy my whole life and my doctorate is in the biological sciences and neuroscience. We actually call it brain science at that time, but I never put the two together. I never thought of philosophy of biology until fairly recently when I've discovered this field which has developed in the last few decades and you've been a pioneer in it. And it's like a new world to me even though I've loved philosophy and I've been in biology. So, let's get a sense of what is philosophy of biology, why is it the case, and look in both directions from the philosophical perspective and how it helps biology, and then is there anything in reverse? Can biology help some philosophical problems? So, I think a good starting point would be not to make too sharp a distinction between philosophy and biology. Um because in philosophy of biology, clearly one is engaging with the substance of biology. And in biology, often one has very broad theoretical questions of the kind philosophers are used to. So, firstly would be that they really merge into one another. And if you were to think of philosophy as some very kind of self-contained activity in an armchair and biology, you know, up to your elbows in test tubes and reagents and things, then you might um it might be harder to see the connection. Um but once you see that, then I think perhaps there are two ways in which philosophy of biology or very theoretical biology can differ

### Why Biology Can Lose the Big Picture [1:38]

from the everyday practice. One of them would be just in the difference in breadth and depth. Um and so so increasingly scientists get very deeply into one very narrow area. So, you can sort of imagine somebody spending their life uh becoming absolutely expert on chromosome 17 in humans. — And that's wonderful, and it it produces great uh knowledge, but of course, it does sometimes lose the big picture. So, a lot of what philosophers do is uh trying to draw connections between things that um biologists uh are independently different biologists might be talking about, but they don't necessarily think enough about the way they connect to possibly positively, possibly negatively. — What's an example of that? Well, I suppose um that if I were to pursue the example of genetics, if you're just working on a very specific set of genetic problems, um looking at how um perhaps how one particular gene is expressed and some ramifications of that, you don't think a lot about the concept of a gene. Uh and in philosophy, um and to some degree in broader theoretical biology, we realize we we've thought a great deal about the different ways in which genes are uh distinguished within a chromosome. And it turns out to be incredibly complicated. And um taxonomists used to say sometimes in their more cynical moments, "A species is just what a good taxonomist calls a species. " And I think you can rather say the same about genetics now, that a gene is pretty much what a competent geneticist wants to call a gene. So, and if you lose track of that, sometimes you can um lose track of some of the complexities, the qualifications to what's implied by um what you're saying. You've developed the idea of a metaphysics of biology, which seems like a subset of the philosophy of biology. So, what can you learn or discern from a metaphysical approach to biology, which is a term that we often don't use in biology? Metaphysics has its own general features of the world connotations that are that seem alien from biology. Uh but you've joined the two together. So, what more specifically can you do with a metaphysics approach to biology? — Well, of course, this was the second of the two ways in which I think philosophy of biology is distinct from the general practice of biology. And I certainly I think [clears throat] this is So, um So, I think that um sometimes it's easy for a scientist to lose track of what they're talking about. Um but you know

### The Metaphysics of Natural Kinds [4:49]

uh so, um I my first interest in this came uh through an interest in essences of things, which was a kind of negative um bit of metaphysics, but it used to be that it was very much an assumption certainly among philosophers and certainly a number of large number of biologists that things fell into kinds and that this was a fact about the world that there were certain natural kinds — distinct natural kinds. That's right. That's the um term we used to use a lot. And that these natural kinds were natural kinds, but but the thing belonged to a natural kind because it had a particular essence, an essential property. Now, I got interested in — differential from other things. There was a boundary between them that Yeah, I it absolutely. So, you know, we're human. There's some genetic property that if you have that, you're human. If you don't, you're not. And so, that means everything in the world is either a human or it's not a human. Um which may be true, but it's not a good example. But, um So, I I my one of my first

### Evolution Depends on Variability [6:06]

interests many years ago was in what was a skeptical interest in this view. And partly coming from actual experience of particularly botany, where it's incredibly difficult to make these distinctions. And everything hybridizes. And of course, everything's evolving [clears throat] all the time. So, uh so, this the the dominant um feature of the whole thing tends to be diversity, variability even within a kind. So, I think looking a little further into this, you could see there's nothing in the biology um that would make you think there was any such property. And indeed, quite the reverse, the possibility of evolution is largely premised on the fact that there is always variation of no particular limited amount. I mean, a indefinite variability within a kind. So, there's an example of something where the general nature of the project is quite different. Is either these Does it consist of these discrete kinds or a great diversity of things that could be divided into kinds in different ways? And I concluded that it was the latter. And I think that this was something that really makes a difference to how you think about certainly evolution. We Actually, I think you can't think about evolution. What are some other questions that a metaphysics of biology can ask? Well, the the what I take to be almost the biggest one is um comes down to the really the fundamental nature of the

### Biology Is About Processes, Not Substances [7:48]

entities that we're talking about in when we do biology. And the metaphysical thesis that has interested me particularly over the last uh say 15 years has been that actually we are always in biology dealing with processes rather than — substances or things. And actually we should So one way one very simple way of putting this is we always tend to assume that when we've identified a thing the default state of it is that it stays the same. What we're interested in is understanding why it changes. But in biology um most of the time what we should really care about is why it stays the same. Why you and I at the end of this discussion may still look much the same and be because we are these extraordinarily complex systems and it's takes trillions of chemical events within us at every moment to um to maintain that um that stability. So it's the miracle is that we stay the same not that we — Let's spend a minute or two on the reverse direction. How biology might influence or benefit philosophy? Well, of course I mean if you go you could go back to I don't know the history and look at say Aristotle and it would have been an extraordinary question to ask him because um so much of his uh philosophy was was um understanding the living world. But it would be it seems that that's still true today. If we're interested in understanding reality we should be interested in understanding life because that's the most interesting part of reality and is also us. So that that's a kind of very naive answer in a way, but it seems to me it's probably uh I suppose that the stage where it gets a little bit more interesting is that a lot of philosophers have tended to think that understanding life was a matter of common sense and intuition. I mean, you know, if you know what an organism is when you see one, you know, what it is to be alive cuz you are alive and you feel but of course, you know, a few centuries of science has surely told us that well, those you know, things we intuit about living about life may have may be true. They're not very deep in relation to in comparison to some of the things that we now understand about how living things actually function, how they do what they do, how they came to exist as we now know through the theory of evolution. So I think that for philosophy I mean, not to care about life would be extraordinary and the knowledge we have gained of life through um biology would be equally extraordinary. So I think it's it is as in your former field, they might have said a no brainer. —