Philosophers of science have long been uneasy with biology, preferring instead to focus on physics. At the heart of this preference is a mistrust of uncertainty. Science is supposed to be the study of what is true everywhere and for all times, and the phenomena of science are supposed to be repeatable, interested in how elephants and mice got to be such different sizes in the first place.
Philosophers of science have not been alone in claiming that science must consist of universal laws. Some evolutionary biologists have also acceded to the general intellectual disdain for the merely particular and tried to emulate physicists, constructing their science as a set of universal laws. In formulating the notion of a universal life, and they have raised the possibility that historical contingency is an integral factor in biology.
To illustrate the difference between biologists favoring universal, deterministic laws of evolutionary development and those leaving room for historical contingency, consider two favorite statements of philosophers (both of which appear, at first sight, to be universal assertions): “All planets move in ellipses” and “All swans are white.” The former is truly universal necessary consequence of the laws governing the motion of objects in a gravitational field.
Biological determinists would say that “All swans are white” is universal in the same way, since, if all swans were white, it would be because the laws of natural selection make it impossible for swans to be otherwise: natural selection favors those characteristics that increase the average rate of offspring production, and of evolutionary theory has been the history of the struggle between these two views of swans.
What this question is testing
Anticipate
This is an Inference question, and the passage tells you the answer almost directly in P1. Why do philosophers prefer physics? Because they distrust uncertainty and historical contingency. They want phenomena that are repeatable and follow universal laws. That's a fact about the phenomena physics studies — they're universal in a way biology phenomena aren't.
Goal
Look for the answer that ties the preference to what physics is about — the kind of stuff it studies. Common traps:
Answers that pin the preference on difficulty (biology is harder), popularity (physics gets more press), institutions, or philosopher backgrounds — none of these are in the passage
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