Laura Franklin-Hall (New York University)
The most prominent single consideration philosophers of biology have offered against the possibility of biological laws comes from John Beatty (1995), who suggests that it is the contingency of evolution that makes it impossible for biological generalizations to provide the counterfactual support that laws must offer. This paper will reply to Beatty's concerns by examining a variety of generalizations that, though not exceptionless, appear true of organisms in lineages with pregnancy, a reproductive tactic that has independently evolved as many as 140 different times across the tree of life.
