Departmental History: Philosophy of Biology

“We Shone Brightly”: Robert Brandon and Alex Rosenberg 
on the Philosophy of Biology at Duke

In 1979, the philosophy department was looking for a philosopher of physics. Instead, they had to settle for their second-choice candidate, a philosopher of biology named Robert Brandon.

At the time, Brandon says, philosophy of biology “barely existed” as a subdiscipline. But questions about foundational concepts like fitness and teleology had begun to pique some philosophers’ interest, as had confrontations among biologists over E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975).

In this nascent period for the field, Brandon worked to establish Duke’s presence. His efforts led to the hire of Greg Cooper (in 1999), Alex Rosenberg (in 2000), and Karen Neander (in 2006), and he forged relationships with Duke biologists like Dan McShea and Fred Nijhout.

Rosenberg and Brandon soon secured a four-year, $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund a Center for the Philosophy of Biology. The money supported graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, a reading group, and an annual research conference.

“That really put us on the map,” Rosenberg said.

By the mid-2000s, the department found itself tied for first place in the Leiter rankings for philosophy of biology, and in some cohorts, a majority of graduate students worked on philosophy of biology or mind.

“We went from being a good place to do philosophy of biology to being the best place to be,” Brandon said.

Recently, Wayne Norman and Lindsay Huth talked with Brandon and Rosenberg about their biggest successes, their infamous sparring, and how Brandon proved himself to a biologist by getting his hands dirty.

Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

 

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Wayne: If Lindsay’s going to do a newsletter write-up on the philosophy of biology era at Duke Philosophy, what is the lede?

Alex: The lede is: when I came to the philosophy department, the entire community of philosophy of biology was scandalized and outraged. The thought of Rosenberg and Brandon in the same department.

Wayne: Did you hate each other already at that point? Was it widely known?

Alex: Well, I remember when I was interviewed by the Dean of Graduate Study, Lewis Siegel, and Robert and I were sitting at the table and Siegel said to me, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well, whatever Brandon does, I do the exact opposite.” But then almost immediately we wrote a paper together for BJPS and realized that the diversity of our views on most topics was a huge benefit to the department.

Robert: And we taught philosophy of biology together. Which was interesting.

Alex: And then Robert started teaching it with Dan [McShea], and I started teaching it with Dan, which was another great thing. But people would ask me at conferences, “How do you get along with Brandon?” And I said, “Great!” And they were somewhat taken aback.

Wayne: What did you say, Robert, when they asked you the same question?

Robert: Uh, is Alex still online? [Laughs] No, it was a fruitful relationship, as Alex just said, and the fact that we didn’t agree on everything was actually a good thing. So that students could go back and forth, you know: “Alex said that.” And I said, “Well, that’s ridiculous.” They would go to Alex and say, “Robert said that.” And he would say, “That’s ridiculous.”

Alex: This was particularly worthwhile in the reading group. We’d come in having read the same thing and having different takes on it.

Robert: When the reading group was at its height, it was just this marvelous thing. 

Alex: It was wonderful.

Wayne: It does seem like there was a living, growing, breathing, organic thing at the university that was kind of anchored here.

Alex: It was exciting to come into the office every day. 

 

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Alex: Let me say something about Robert before we go on. I think that the intellectually most important event in our period of flourishing was Robert’s book with Dan McShea, Biology’s First Law. The intellectual debate and the discussions on the relationship between drift and selection that were really dominant in the profession over that period — I think they were finished by a book that had the last word on the subject. I think that is Robert’s great achievement and probably the flagship for what we did at Duke. I mean, I wrote a lot about reductionism, and I think it’s sort of gotten into the woodwork. But that book represents something really important for the discipline.

Robert: Thank you for saying that. I actually agree, I think it’s my best work. And I would add that it’s a really Duke project. It’s something that came out of this long interaction that Dan and I had, along with lots of other people at Duke. So it couldn’t have happened elsewhere.

Alex: Yeah, it’s something that was important to me because I arrived at Duke having crossed swords with Robert repeatedly in the previous decade about the nature of probability in the theory of natural selection. And it was Robert and Fred Bouchard together who convinced me that I had been completely mistaken and led me to adopt the view which they eventually articulated — Fred in his thesis, and Robert in that book with Dan.

Wayne: What should people present or future in the department know about the philosophy of biology heyday?

Robert: One of the things that I think is most important is that we were really good, and we were recognized as being really good. But besides being really good, we were really distinctive. There was a Duke way of doing philosophy of biology, and everyone recognized that if you come to Duke, you have to engage with biologists. You have to learn some biology. One thing that was importantly distinctive about Duke was that I strongly encouraged the students to get a master’s in biology. 

Wayne: Robert, was interdisciplinarity already a part of the Duke strategic plan when you arrived, or did you watch that become a branding point of the university in general?

Robert: Historically, Duke did encourage interdisciplinary research and was pretty successful at that. So I landed in an environment that was conducive to pushing that forward. The philosophy department, compared to now, was not very interdisciplinary at all. We didn’t have much of a presence elsewhere in the campus. And of course that’s radically changed with time. 

Lindsay: Was philosophy of biology the first big interdisciplinary foray for the philosophy department, or was there something else that predated that?

Robert: I think philosophy of biology was the first. And I would say that provided guidance or a blueprint for where we would try to make an impact on the university — so that we weren’t an insular department, that we were central to the intellectual life of the university. And I think we’ve done a good job of trying to do that.

Wayne: And the philosophy of biology graduates in general seem to have done extremely well on the job market?

Alex: I don’t think we’ve ever had a student who left with a PhD and didn’t get a tenure-track job. Right up through Caleb Hazelwood. (See the table of graduate and postdoctoral alumni below.)

Lindsay: What did your own training in biology look like?

Robert: I spent the last three years of graduate school in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So, I had a lot of training. In fact, the people in the philosophy department wondered what I was doing. Famously, Quine said there’s a continuum between philosophy and science but against that view, he said: Wouldn't you be better off in the biology department? 

So I had training there, and my training really continued here at Duke. One of the things that happened very early on is that I developed contacts with people in the zoology and botany departments. (We didn’t have a biology department then.) And there were people who were receptive, which is not going to be the case at every biology department. 

I will tell you one story: The biology building is shaped like an E, so there are wings to it. And at the back end of one of the wings is the greenhouse. Pretty early on I got my courses cross-listed and there was some guy in the botany department who was just not at all in favor of this. He thought, why are we cross-listing a philosophy course? What does this person know? 

A young member of the botany department, Brent Mishler, was a friend of mine. And an older member of the botany department, Janis Antonovics, was a good friend of mine. Janis and I were doing experiments at the time that involved cloning lots and lots and lots of grasses. And I was in the greenhouse doing that. 

So at 5:00 or whenever the whistle blew, Brent comes walking out with this guy (whose name I can’t remember) and he said, “Oh, let me introduce you to Robert.” Because I was sitting in the greenhouse with my hands completely dirty putting little tillers of grass into little pots. And so I shook his hand with my dirty hand, and that changed his mind.

Wayne: Has the field become less sexy or attractive to people over time?

Alex: Yeah, insofar as it’s a zero-sum game in which some fields grow and other fields diminish because the bandwidth is still limited. I’d say that philosophy of biology has ceded to interests in feminism, social constructionism, political philosophy related to issues of social justice. I think they have swamped other, more technical areas of philosophy and have had an impact on philosophy of biology in general.

Robert: While I agree with that, there’s something else I would add. I think the work in philosophy of biology is just intrinsically less good.

Alex: Yes, I agree.

Robert: And that’s because it doesn’t have the genius it once had. That’s one explanation. Another explanation is that the so-called geniuses that it once had were picking the low fruit, and they got it all. So now the fruits are up high.

Alex: So what’s interesting is, if you follow the literature and you read the main journals, the characteristic work is now philosophically un-adventuresome and consists in reporting on the minutiae of biological developments in a couple of different areas of biology. So it’s much less interesting and intellectually exciting than it was 15 years ago. 

Robert: Yeah, it’s sort of late-stage Ptolemaic astronomy. 

Wayne: Is there anything else you’d like to add about philosophy of biology at Duke?

Alex: We were a magnet for a long time. But it was interesting how, with Robert’s retirement and Karen [Neander]’s death, the whole enterprise was starved by lack of replacement.

Robert: And, on a personal note, I’m sad about that but, on the other hand, maybe philosophy of biology at Duke lifespan is over. We shone brightly.

Philosophy of Biology Alumni

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