IAN HACKING

HOW “NATURAL” ARE “KINDS” OF SEXUAL

ORIENTATION?

(Received 20 August 2001)

Edward Stein’s book is an encyclopedic study of, in the words

of its subtitle,The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orienta-
tion.1 It is an authoritative history of twentieth century scientific
approaches to sexual orientations, too often described simplistically
as the scientific study of homosexuality. It is also a rich body of
analysis, distinctions and arguments. I was reminded of late medi-
aeval works that explained, with a ruthless thoroughness, every
conceivable argument on a topic, pro and con.
The book is being most noticed for the question posed by its final
chapter, “Should Scientific Work on Sexual Orientation be Done?”
To oversimplify, Stein’s short answer is, probably not. Or at any rate,
the research will not prove to be a good way to change attitudes to
the variety of sexual orientations. I shall not address this question
directly except for a few words at the end, but I do share many of
Stein’s reservations.
In 1990 Stein published a valuable collection of theoretical
papers about sexual orientation.2 The contributors roughly divided
as “essentialist” and “constructionist.” Stein included his own paper
about the nature of that division of opinion, where he suggested that
the distinction itself may be wrongly or misleadingly made.3 Notice

Publisher’s Note:

Due to a misunderstanding, this paper was published in Issue 21/1 of Law and
Philosophy. We apologise for this mistake. We reproduce it here, as was intended,
as part of the four Discussion papers of this issue.
1 Edward Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics

of Sexual Orientation (New York: Oxford, 1999).

2 Edward Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social

Constructionist Controversy, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 1992).

3 Edward Stein, ‘Essentials of Constructionism and the Construction of

Essentialism’, in Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: pp. 325–359.

Law and Philosophy 21: 335–347, 2002.

© Kluwer Law International 2002.
336 IAN HACKING

that those two terms, “essential” and “constructed” can be taken in

two ways: individual and collective. In terms of an individual, an
essentialist holds that one’s sexual orientation arises independently
of the social milieu in which one lives, although the ways in which
the orientation is expressed depends on history and social context.
There is a tendency to treat essential properties as part of one’s
intrinsic biological nature; something one is born with. In terms of
a collectivity, an essentialist holds that the range of personal sexual
orientations within any society is constituted independently of the
social arrangements within that society, although their expressions
would depend on those arrangements.
The individual and collective versions of essentialism do not
appear to differ much, but there are great differences within the
family of ideas called constructionism. In the most simple-minded
constructionist version about individuals, one’s sexual orientation
is a matter of choice and taste conditioned by the social world in
which one grew up or moved into. Notice how this contrasts with
one collective version, often associated with the work of Michel
Foucault. He proposed that the idea of the homosexual, as a kind
of person, came into being only in the course of the nineteenth
century in Europe. This “kind” was the product of a specific legal
and medical body of thought and institutions. You could not be “that
kind of person” – whatever that means – before then. This doctrine
is entirely consistent with the idea that in many times, places, and
civilizations, individual sexual orientations have arisen as matters of
choice and taste conditioned by social arrangements. But whatever
the orientation, practices, choices and behavior, those would not
produce a certain kind of person, a homosexual, unless they lived
in or after the nineteenth century.
From a logical point of view, then, Foucault’s “constructionism”
is entirely consistent with a thorough-going essentialism. His
analysis need not be revised even if genetics or some other branch
of science were to prove that every individual in the history of
the human race had a pre-determined sexual orientation. It would
remain the case (if he was correct) that only at a certain time did
the idea of the homosexual as a “kind of person” come into being.
(Many types of collective constructionism other than Foucault’s are
also formally consistent with essentialism, but I single out Foucault
 SEXUAL ORIENTATION 337

because one of his essays serves as the first contribution to Stein’s

1990 anthology.)
Long ago I sketched one subversion of Foucault’s proposal in a
paper of my own, which Stein also reprinted. Although the paper
began briefly with the example of homosexuality, my intention was
to show how new concepts and modes of description, including self-
description, create new ways to be a person, and create new kinds of
choices for an individual.4 That was only one analytic philosopher’s
way of learning from Foucault. There have been many other ways
to learn from him. “Constructionism” is a narrow and unimaginative
name for the sorts of thoughts that Foucault made possible. The
subtlety, and in my opinion the interest, of Foucault’s ideas makes it
unnattractive to use the blanket label, “constructionist,” except as a
sort of pointer.5

CAUTION ABOUT THE IDEA OF NATURAL KINDS

Stein’s new book is in many ways a continuation by other means of

the topics introduced in his own paper in his anthology. In part he
wants to undo or undermine the seemingly sharp contrast between
essentialist and constructionist attitudes. One of his strategies is to
introduce a theoretical framework taken from analytic philosophy,
namely the theory of natural kinds. In brief, and far more crassly
than in Stein’s elegant analysis: are sexual orientations natural
kinds or not? This is only one aspect of the book. I have already
mentioned the topic of the final chapter, namely, should the research
be done? That is the third of three concluding chapters on ethics.
The previous nine chapters are grouped in two parts, “Metaphysics”
and “Science.” Most of the discussion of natural kinds is in the first
part. One reason Stein thinks the research is poor is that questions
are ill-formulated, in part because the scientists have not clarified
the classifications they try to use. I was asked to comment on the
4 Ian Hacking, ‘Making Up People’, in T. Heller et al. (eds.), Reconstructing
Individualism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, l986), pp. 222–236. Reprinted
in Stein, Forms of Desire, pp. 69–88.
5 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1999), chapter 3, explains why I am leery of the label “construc-
tion.”
338 IAN HACKING

book because I have spent some time thinking about classification.

I shall take that as my mandate, to be a sort of technical consultant
on “natural kinds.”
Stein is hardly the first philosopher to ask, “Is homosexuality a
natural kind?” But he is the first to make plain some of the confu-
sions involved in posing a question in this way. It is a fundamental
premise of Stein’s book that there are a great many different kinds
of sexual orientation. Moreover it is not at all clear that “homosexu-
ality” is a kind of anything, natural or unnatural. Hence the switch
to a more complex question: are sexual orientations natural kinds?
The diversity of sexual orientations is not, in my opinion, the end
of the difficulty. There is something profoundly anomalous about
this way of organizing things. Stein is addressing what I call real-
world questions. Is it the case that some same-sex-gender orienta-
tions are correlated with certain genetic markers, as is claimed
by Dean Hamer?6 Is it the case that some sexual orientations are
correlated with certain familial arrangements experienced in child-
hood?7 Such questions sound quite direct, and imply conjectures
about the root causes of sexual orientations. The questions do not
mention natural kinds. I can think of almost no other group of
real-world questions, aside from questions that are quite explicitly
about taxonomy, that prompts anyone to ask, “is so and so a natural
kind?” Why has natural-kind talk seemed attractive in connection
with issues of sexual orientation?
There is one embarrassingly banal answer to this question.
Homosexuality was once said to involve “unnatural acts.” What
better way to discredit that language than to prove that homosexu-
ality is a natural kind? Even contemplating the possibility seems
to undermine the preconception that homosexuality is unnatural. Is
that why natural-kind talk has been so attractive here? If so, we are
being misled by a bad pun, for the “natural” in unnatural acts and
nothing to do with the “natural” in natural kinds.
I have already misrepresented Stein: his main analytical tool
is not the idea of a natural kind but of what he calls a “natural

6 Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the
Gay Gene and thje Biology of Behavior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
7 For example, Robert Trivers, ‘Parent-Offspring Conflict’, American Zoolo-

gist 14 (1974): 229–264.

 SEXUAL ORIENTATION 339

human kind.” Before I examine that, I must make a number of

rather skeptical remarks about the idea of a natural kind itself. We
do not, in ordinary English, talk about “kinds” just-like-that. We
talk about kinds of seal, the harp seal, the hooded seal. We talk
about kinds of cabbage and perhaps even kinds of king. But we do
not talk about kinds, full-stop. Yet we do talk that way in English-
language analytic philosophy.8 The practice began in 1840 (William
Whewell) and was cemented in 1843 (John Stuart Mill).9
The practice was derived from a real-life eighteenth century
debate in natural history, the predecessor of biology. There was
a great discussion about natural groups or classes. “Natural”
contrasted with “artificial.” An artificial grouping was a classi-
fication made up in order to sort out complex material, not because
the group was to be found “in nature,” but because it helped us
organize our thoughts. In botany we construct a taxonomic tree with
species, genus, family, phylum, right up to kingdom. One popular
view was that the species are natural groups, while even the genus
was artificial, a classification that botanists introduced in order to
create a convenient system of naming the vast arrray of species
found in nature. Another view was that the genus was natural,
but anything higher up, the family, the phylum, or whatever, was
artificial, that is, a classificatory convenience. This type of dispute
continues today, in the tub thumping world of systematic biological
classification.
The problem of which classifications are natural is not peculiar
to biology. The French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher,
A. A. Cournot, writing in 1851, used groups of stars as an illus-
tration. The ancient Greek system of constellations is (he argued)
artificial.10 The stars in Cassiopeia or Orion are grouped together

8 There is no technical term meaning “natural kind” in any language other than
English, but as the next note indicates, “kind” has been given a technical sense in
English philosophy since 1840.
9 William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols (London:

John W. Parker, 1840), Bk. VIII, ch. I, §4. The title of this section is simply
‘Kinds’. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive; Being
a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific
Investigation (London: Longman, 1843), Bk. I, ch. VII, §4.
10 A. A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondements de nos connaissances et sur les

caractères de la critique philosophique (Paris: Vrin, 1975), pp. 199–208.

340 IAN HACKING

for the convenience of navigators, and for ease of recognition by

observers. But the nebulae, which had been first recognized by
William Herschel, are natural groups of stars. Cournot was the first
philosopher to propose an explanation of the idea of natural classi-
fications in terms of causality. The members of any class will have
some properties in common that serve to define the class. The class
is natural when the members not only share properties, but also
when the reasons, the causes, why they have those properties are
the same throughout the class.11 There is every reason to think that
the stars in a galaxy have related causal histories that cause them to
be in the galaxy. There is no reason to think that the stars in Orion’s
belt have parallel causal histories.
This may seem a very long way from our topic, but that is
what technical consultants are for. First of all, I wanted to remind
you that the idea of a natural kind began in a fully intelligible
real-world non-philosophical way. The voyages of discovery and
European imperialism were bringing endless plants to Paris and
London. How should we classify the incredible diversity of species
distributed across the globe? The terminology has changed a bit, but
there continue to be, at this very moment, real-life debates about
which taxa are natural and which are artificial. Taxonomy is the
home of the debates, and real-life questions about which kinds are
“natural” seldom arise elsewhere. The appearance of the same ques-
tion in connection with sexual orientation is, to say the very least,
unexpected.
A second point is that Stein defines natural kinds by taking one
element from the rather rich theory that we owe to Hilary Putnam:
“Natural kinds play a role in scientific laws and explanations.”12

11 Cournot thought that classes were defined by shared properties. But one can
generalize to clusters of properties produced by the same underlying causes. See
Richard Boyd, ‘What Realism Implies and What it Does Not’, Dialectica 43
(1989): 5–29. Boyd adds the requirement that the clusters of properties should
be stabilized by causal homeostasis; that is, they should be kept clustered by
some sort of feedback mechanism. An excellent summary of Boyd’s ideas can be
found in Frank Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 42–47. Keil is a psychologist who studies cognitive
development in children; he was a colleague of Boyd’s when he wrote this book.
12 Stein, Mismeasure, p. 81. Putnam presented his theory in many places, but

the classic is his 1975 paper, ‘The meaning of “meaning” ’, reprinted in Hilary
 SEXUAL ORIENTATION 341

This is really not enough to get at Putnam’s intended idea of natural

kinds. Since Martha Nussbaum’s comments on The Mismeasure of
Desire precede mine, I have no need to develop the point, for she
has given several counterexamples, both compelling and amusing.13
I cannot improve on them, but it is useful to repeat the source
of the difficulty. It is none other than the above-mentioned point
made by Cournot a century and a half ago. Playing a role in laws
and explanations is not enough. We need causes. In the strongest
case, the underlying causes that make something of kind K should
be the same, right across all the members of kind K. We require
something like Richard Boyd’s explication of this imprecise idea,
as cited in note 10. And of course that is precisely the point of
the numerous research programs examined by Stein. Even an added
causal criterion provides, together with then rest, at most a necessary
condition and not a sufficient one, but I shall not pursue the matter.
Note that Dean Hamer (note 6) is looking not only for a correlation
between genetic markers and sexual orientation: he conjectures that
there is a “gay gene” that causes people to be gay.
A third point is that we understand a qualifying adjective only
when we know what it contrasts with. “Natural kind” originally
contrasted with “artificial kind.” An artificial classification was one
introduced by artifice, for our convenience. Stein alludes to a more
recent concept, that of an “artifactual kind”. This is a completely
different notion from that of an artificial kind. It was introduced in
order to name classes of artifacts, things made by people and not
found in nature. Pencils have been used as an example.14 The class
of pencils is not an artificial kind – there is nothing artificial about
grouping pencils together as a class – but a class of things that are
artificial, or at any rate a class of artifacts.
Stein, however, uses a different definition. An artifactual kind is,
roughly “a group of things that have a common property only in
virtue of human intentions.” 15 Stein writes that if (per impossibile)
Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981) pp. 215–271.
13 Nussbaum, pp. 318–320 supra.
14 Steven Schwartz, ‘Putnam on Artifacts’, Philosophical Review 87 (1978):

566–574.
15 Stein, Mismeasure, p. 79. He says he takes this explanation from Keil,

Concepts, op. cit., note 11. Keil was struck by the apparent fact that children
342 IAN HACKING

there were in the Rocky Mountains a spring gushing forth a liquid

that is indistinguishable in taste and in chemistry from Diet Pepsi, “it
would not be a diet soft drink until humans discover it and interact
with it in certain ways.” I find this confusing. Compare gold, which
has long been one of the philosopher’s favorite examples of a natural
kind. Gold was certainly not a medium of exchange and a standard
of monetary value “until humans discover[ed] it and interact[ed]
with it in certain ways.” But that does not mean that gold fails to
be a natural kind. Likewise, naturally occurring dietpepsi would be
a natural kind. (I use lower case letters deliberately, as in “kleenex”,
a proprietary name become generic.) Since dietpepsi does not occur
in the table of elements, it would be a less fundamental kind than
gold, but, by hypothesis, it would be just as natural. And if we got
all our diet soft drinks from this and other springs, diet soft drinks
would not form an artifactual kind, that is, a class of artifact, any
more than standards of monetary value do.
I apologize for mentioning such pedantic niceties. I do so only
to illustrate the fact that what seems to be plain sailing, in Edward
Stein’s introduction to the ideas of natural and human kinds, is full
of shoals, sharks, and other submarine perils. I question the useful-
ness of the natural kind idea for Stein’s purposes. The idea arose
in the history of biological taxonomy. It has been invoked in devel-
opmental psychology, where it has been conjectured that an ability
to sort items into at least some natural kinds is innate.16 But the
idea has not found much employment in any other real-life topic.
Both Bertrand Russell and W. V. Quine opined that although the
notion of kind might have some value early in the life of a child (or
of the human race) the more we find out about the world, the less
important the notion of kind becomes.17 I could explain why it came

so readily distinguish living creatures from artifacts, as if the ability to make this
distinction is innate. Stein cites Keil, pp. 47–51 (the pages directly after those
in which Keil presents Boyd’s causal homeostasis as a characteristic of natural
kinds). Keil listed nine types of difference between natural kinds and artifacts, of
which at most one, labeled “The need for intention” seems to resemble Stein’s
definition.
16 Frank Keil, cited in notes 10 and 15, is an authority on this topic.
17 “The doctrine of natural kinds is only an approximate and transitional

assumption on the road to more fundamental laws of a different kind.” Bertrand

Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London: George Allen and
 SEXUAL ORIENTATION 343

to matter in philosophy, mostly in connection with the problem of

induction, for Mill, for John Venn, for Bertrand Russell, for C. D.
Broad, for Quine. I could relate how it became part of the theory
of meaning and reference in the work of Hilary Putnam and Saul
Kripke. Those were all worthy philosophical projects, but they were
not much directed to any pressing “real-life” controversy. Edward
Stein has endeavored to apply this philosophical structure to real-life
questions. I am not sure that he was wise to do so.

NATURAL HUMAN KINDS

Stein’s real interest is in what he calls “natural human kinds,” a novel

label. It is the chief theoretical notion in the first part of his book.
Here I must cast modesty aside. Stein writes, “Ian Hacking intro-
duced the notion of a human kind to talk about groups of people.
Expanding on this notion, I [Edward Stein] use the term natural
human kind for a natural kind that applies to people . . .”.18 In his
terminology, the contrast type is social human kind.
In fact Stein did not “expand” on this notion, but diverted it. I am
not troubled by that. I sincerely subscribe to the view that once you
have said something, any serious reader and speaker can make any
use of your words consistent with the common decencies of intellec-
tual life. And if the original author thinks he was misunderstood, that
is usually his fault, not that of the consumer. I claim no ownership
of the phrase “human kind.” I recently abandoned it because it was
too seductive a phrase. People had started using it to mean all sorts
of things. So I invented some less attractive nomenclature. But first
human kinds.
I should begin with a minor qualm about what Stein calls essen-
tialism. In footnote 10 of his “Précis” he asks us to note that his “way
of using the term ‘essentialism’ differs from the way some philos-
ophers use it.” This is rather an understatement. In his “Précis” Stein
writes that “essentialism about sexual orientation is the view that
sexual orientations are natural human kinds,” while constructionism
Unwin, 1948), p. 461f. For a more flamboyant dismissal of the notion of kind,
see W. V. Quine, ‘Natural Kinds’, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 114–138, on p. 138.
18 Stein, Mismeasure, p. 84.
344 IAN HACKING

is the view that they are not. 19 This does not seem quite right, for it
appears to be grounded on the thought that “essentialism about Xs is
the view that Xs are natural human kinds.” But take X = is infected
with tuberculosis. Being infected with TB plays a role in scientific
laws and explanations (Stein’s criterion for being a natural kind).
There are definite causes for such infections, namely bacteria (the
causal criterion I attribute to Cournot and Boyd). I can think of no
philosopher who would claim that being infected with tuberculosis
is an essential property of a tubercular person.
But now I wish to take up what at at the outset is just
another tedious terminological issue, but which leads into inter-
esting territory. I used “human kind” to contrast with “natural kind.”
Human kinds, as I intended to use the expression, are not natural
kinds! “Natural human kind” would, in my parlance, have been a
virtual self-contradiction. I no longer own the words, but I should
explain what I was trying to do.
What interests me about classifications of people is the way in
which they interact with the people classified. This research interest
began 18 years ago with the very paper that Stein reprinted, “Making
up People.” The dynamics of human kinds is fascinating. Let a
new way to classify human beings emerge, and let people become
aware of how they are classified, then they will often behave differ-
ently (not necessarily better or worse, but differently). The truths
about that category of people will change because the people have
changed. In consequence, the classifications may themselves have to
be modified, for what is being classified has changed. Certainly the
knowledge that the classifications are used to encode will change.
That is, classifications interact with the classified. I titled one long
paper “The looping effects of human kinds.”20
There are many other types of dynamics. That is precisely why
I wanted “human kinds” to form a contrast with “natural kinds.” To
be schematic: there are no looping effects of natural kinds. Phos-
phorus does not change once we label something phosphorus. Of
course once we know about phosphorus, we may change it and use

19 Stein, supra., and on p. 84 of Mismeasure.

20 Ian Hacking, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, in D. Sperber, D.
Premack and A. Premack (eds.), Causal Cognition. An Interdisciplinary Approach
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 351–383.
 SEXUAL ORIENTATION 345

it. But simply calling phosphorus “phosphorus” makes no differ-

ence to phosphorus. Phosphorus (in our anti-animist world vision)
never comes to know that it is phosphorus. But being called homo-
sexual, or coming to think of yourself as homosexual, has made a
great deal of difference to many human beings over the past 150
years. To speak in a ludicrous way to convey my simple meaning:
Phosphorus does not come out, homosexuals do. There have been
endless looping effects. The concept “homosexual”, on my view of
history, was once owned by the medical and legal professions. Then
the people categorized as homosexuals took over the ownership of
the concept, and changed names, changed meanings, changed the
world. “Homosexual” became what I have called a “self-ascriptive
kind.”21
That (in my opinion) is just one of the ways that people and the
ways they are classified can interact. There are many different types
of looping. My label “human kinds” was intended to introduce an
analysis of this phenomenon. Some time ago I pretty much aban-
doned the phrase, and would happily jettison “natural kind” too. I
say, “pretty much abandoned,” for of course labels don’t evaporate
quickly.
The chief thing I notice about natural kinds, cosmic or mundane,
quarks, phosphorus, or mud, is that they are indifferent. They could
not care, let alone care less, about how we classify them. It makes
no difference to quarks or mud, how we classify them, although of
course it does make a difference what we do after we have created a
classification and found out something about it.
But it makes a big difference to people, how they are classi-
fied. Not just because we praise some or incarcerate others, but
because they come to think of themselves in new ways, to see new
choices for action, to be new kinds of beings. Some classifications
interact with the people classified, with associated looping effects.
These classifications are what I call interactive. In a nutshell, my
present philosophy of “kinds” comes to this: the indifferent and the
interactive.22 These are not exactly mutually exclusive, natural and
non-natural, as it were, but I shall leave the matter there at present.

21 Ibid., p. 380.
22 See Ian Hacking, What?, op. cit., pp. 103–106.
346 IAN HACKING

MOVING TARGETS

I would prefer not to address the topic of sexual orientation in

terms of kinds, natural, indifferent or whatever. But since we have
been set in this direction by Edward Stein, I should conclude by
suggesting how my observations link up with his question, “Should
scientific research on sexual orientation be done?” He observes that
such research often ends up with a medical model. Medicine is
predicated on a dichotomy, health and ill-health, the normal and
the pathological, well-being and deviation from the norm. Medical
research is directed at pathologies. One investigates schizophrenia,
and seldom considers why most people are not schizophrenic. So,
Stein reminds us, a research proposal in the medical tradition will
target the question, why are some people homosexual, and not ask
why other people are heterosexual.
Stein also observes that scientific research is usually taken to
aim at discovering human universals. Anthropologists may examine
what is specific to a society, but on the medical model one is
concerned with human pathologies, qua human universals, even if
they are distributed differently, for reasons of nutrition, climate, or
inheritance, in different populations. Stein remarks that it is not
obvious that all or even many societies attach much importance to
“sexual orientation.” There may be no universal to investigate. These
points are well taken. I would add one supplementary observation.
The very words “scientific research” on human beings now
suggest the discovery of underlying biological structures – physio-
logical, biochemical, neurological, genetic, or whatever. It would
be of enormous interest if a research team found a genetic marker
or biochemical substance that was strongly correlated with certain
sexual orientations. I do not believe that is going to happen. I do
not expect that we shall obtain results of this type that stand up
to persistent critical inquiry and elaboration. But I do not a priori
rule that out. I am surprised daily, astonished weekly, and astounded
monthly, by advances in fundamental life sciences. If I were on a
panel distributing scarce research resources, I would be unenthusi-
astic about a grant proposal in this area. I would use Stein’s chapters
to encourage the applicants to get clear about what they thought they
were investigating.
 SEXUAL ORIENTATION 347

Despite this skepticism, I also know that we often do not under-

stand results until after we have got them and have had prolonged,
acrimonious, critical debate about what they mean. So I do not
exclude the possibility of real results in this research area, even if
we might not be able to clearly define what they would mean until
after we had got them.
But I see a different difficulty. What is called “scientific research”
assumes that it is investigating universals that are coded by indiffer-
ent classifications, classifications unaffected by what we find out.
I have been suggesting that the wide range of sexual orientations
constitute interactive kinds, for which the entire model of biolog-
ized scientific research is inappropriate. Biology aims at a fixed
target of indifferent kinds. We are here concerned with a moving
and interactive targets that won’t stay still. More power to them.
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