{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020014044943820225, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.698, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (review)

Philosophy can be so much fun. You get to eat the conceptual icing off the empirical cake and eat as much of the cake as you want to. This is in distinct contrast to the work-a-day travails of the career biologist, who is forced to acquire reams and reams of data in a prescribed manner, much like following a difficult recipe. As a scientist, or a chef, if one is not meticulous then the whole product will be unusable, and nothing will come of it except lost effort and expenditure. However, if one is meticulous, then others can enjoy the resulting scientific or culinary masterpiece—even if the scientist or the chef is too tired to enjoy it himself. Being a philosopher has all the advantages of being a food critic rather than a chef, or a science writer rather than a scientist. So it was with great relish that I began this book. I was not disappointed. This book is an engaging and relatively accessible version of modern philosophy of biology told by two philosophers steeped in their discipline and knowledgeable about a wide range of interesting avenues in the modern science of biology. Woven throughout the book are the theories and observations of prominent biologists and prominent philosophers; it is virtually a who’s who of biology and philosophy of biology. It is also remarkably current, while still paying deep and abiding homage to the early evolutionary biologists, whose work and ideas are a major focus in the book. As is fairly typical of today’s books on the philosophy of science, the “received view” is presented as a conceptually tight and logically consistent approach to the discipline, but then it is torn apart by various rents in the apparently seamless fabric. In this sense, the book parallels many books on the philosophy of science that are oriented toward physics. Interestingly, I am not sure how much I got out of this book from a philosophic standpoint, in part because many of the major discussions are discussions which are, at their core, empirically decidable and not philosophically contentious. For example, much of Stephen Gould’s writing concerns the nature of genetic disparity and the role of selection in evolution, topics that do not seem to me to be decidable using typical philosophic debate. There appears to be a Darwinian evolution toward complexity, which at its root appears to be an attempt to better adapt organisms to the complexity of their environment. Gould, at least in part, could be viewed as indicating that selection winnows down the Cambrian era explosion in diversity. In any case, it appears that modern genetic means, with DNA sequences, perhaps from fossils, will certainly provide a clue as to whether selection has narrowed or widened the disparity in life forms. Likewise, the usage of sex appears to