Realism and Antirealism in Evolutionary Biology

Do scientific theories provide us with genuine insight into the casual structure of the world, or do they merely provide useful models for organizing observable phenomena into coherent patterns? Scientific realists maintain that scientific theories do, at least approximately and on some occasions, give us insight into the casual structure of the world, including its unobserved and unobservable parts. Antirealists claim that scientific theories serve a number of useful functions, such as organizing empirical data and facilitating predictions, but revealing the hidden structure of the world is not one of them. At issue here is nothing less than the nature of our scientific understanding of the world.