DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Are Organisms Artifacts of Natural Selection?

Organisms and Artifacts
By Tim Lewens. Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology series, Kim Sterelny and Robert A. Wilson (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/ Bradford Books, 2004. xi + 183 pp. Cloth, $32.00.

To what extent can reverse engineering and optimality modeling explain why organisms have the traits that they do? In general, to what extent is it scientifically fruitful for biologists to view organisms as artifacts designed by natural selection? When biologists attribute functions to the parts or traits of organisms, exactly what is it that they are attributing? Does function in these contexts have the same meaning as it does when one speaks of the function of an artifact or of a part or feature of an artifact?