Functions and Health at the Interface of Biology and Technology

Abstract

Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic biological organisms, but it also reveals insights that are of broader relevance: (1) aetiological accounts of biological function need to omit or reinterpret reference to natural selection. This results in complete continuity between aetiological analyses of function in engineering and philosophy; (2) considering synthetic biology prompts interesting further questions about heritability, ancestry, and biological individuals; and (3) accounts of disease as biological dysfunction do not straightforwardly map onto our intuitive health and disease judgments regarding non‐human animals. In response to the latter point I examine three possible avenues, and tentatively defend one on behalf of the ‘disease as dysfunction’ theorist.

Dispositionalism and Dysfunction

“…It is difficult to overstate the extent to which this line of thought has shaped the current theoretical landscape of the function debate. It has been restated many times (e.g., Cummins 1975;Millikan 1989;Neander 1991;Davies 2001;Garson 2019), and it is not uncommon for the conclusion to be treated as an established result without bothering to restate the argument (e.g., Griffiths 1993;Walsh and Ariew 1996;Mossio, Saborido, and Moreno 2009;Kingma 2020). The continuing debate centers on what lesson we should glean from this failure.…”

“…Philosophical accounts of function are typically divided into one of two approaches: etiological approaches define something's function in terms of its history-usually, a history of design or natural selection-while dispositionalist approaches define something's function in terms of its contributions to the capacities and dispositions of an organized system in which it is embedded (Millikan 1989;Godfrey-Smith 1993;Amundson and Lauder 1994;Kingma 2020).…”

“…Philosophical accounts of function are typically divided into one of two approaches: etiological approaches define something’s function in terms of its history—usually, a history of design or natural selection—whereas dispositionalist approaches define something’s function in terms of its contributions to the capacities and dispositions of an organized system in which it is embedded (Millikan 1989; Godfrey-Smith 1993; Amundson and Lauder 1994; Kingma 2020). There is near-universal consensus in the philosophical literature on functions that dispositionalist approaches cannot accommodate a notion of dysfunction, at least not without abandoning the usual way of understanding dysfunction as having a function but being unable to perform it, and without assigning dysfunction attributions little or no explanatory role.…”

Biology for biomimetics I: function as an interdisciplinary bridge in bio-inspired design

“…In other words, the immediate function of a trait that an engineer may be interested in is not always the same as the ultimate function (figure 5 [85,89,90]). Engineers and designers do recognize the long-term causes of function in their own design, such as the iterative history of a product [91]. However, in general, human problem solvers tend to focus on 'function' in an immediate sense, while biologists often look to the natural processes that brought a current function into existence [87,92].…”

Distinguishing regeneration from degradation in coral ecosystems: the role of value

“…Comparing the pulse of a young organism to an old one may erroneously cast one of them as ill, for example. Reference classes will typically account for all sorts of variation in characteristics depending on the context (Kingma 2007(Kingma , 2020. Both of these accounts stress that context, interests, and values shape the concepts we use.…”