Parts and theories in compositional biology

Abstract. I analyze the importance of parts in the style of biological theorizing that I call com-positional biology. I do this by investigating various aspects, including partitioning frames and explanatory accounts, of the theoretical perspectives that fall under and are guided by composi-tional biology. I ground this general examination in a comparative analysis of three different disciplines with their associated compositional theoretical perspectives: comparative morphology, functional morphology, and developmental biology. I glean data for this analysis from canonical textbooks and defend the use of such texts for the philosophy of science. I end with a discussion of the importance of recognizing formal and compositional biology as two genuinely different ways of doing biology – the differences arising more from their distinct methodologies than from scientific discipline included or natural domain studied. Ultimately, developing a translation manual between the two styles would be desirable as they currently are, at times, in conflict. Goals This article examines two important ideas in biology: parts and theories. I contend that the very notion of parts stands in need of significantly more philosophical attention than it has received (though see, for example, Nage