Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There is a phenomenon much discussed among biologists called "genetic load." It refers to the reduction in the mean fitness of a population caused by some genetic process. Perhaps most important is mutation genetic load Most mutations are deleterious, even if only slightly, and over geological time the  effect on a gene line of the build-up of a lot of these mutations along the strands of DNA becomes serious. You might consider genetic load the biological equivalent of entropy. A population can only tolerate a certain load before going extinct, though it is difficult to quantify load and that maximum acceptable level. On a prior principles, there ought to be a highest sustainable level of mutation load. Some creationists (intelligent-design theorists, if you prefer) contend that the deleterious nature of most mutations, and thus this "load," is fatal to this damned Darwinian nonsense. They see "Darwinism" as the position that life has been gradual...

The September issue of HARPER's included a review by David Quammen of three recent books on the subject of the Neanderthals. What caught my attention, and made me want to commonplace a bit of this, was Quammen's digression onto the two different sorts of biology in general. There are biologists who look at their field as a batter of applied chemistry -- molecules interacting and compounding. There are also biologists who look at life on the level of the organism, or on the still broader level of the whole populations or ecosystems. Reductionists versus holists, if you will, although those words are judgment freighted. Quammen speaks of organismic versus molecular biology. Here's a passage, without further comment. You may have missed this argument, unless you work in the field or are somehow involved with the allocation of university budgets and buildings. It has been quiet and internecine but bitter, and traceable back to the late 1950s and early 60s, when Edward O...