Q20

[giladedelman]

I chose A on this one and felt pretty comfortable.

Any help on how to arrive at E? I didn't eliminate it, but didn't eliminate A either. It seemed to me that the inability to define biology by immutable laws was equivalent to being unable to discover such laws. Thus the philosophers' preference for physics.

Ah, but (A) doesn't say the laws are impossible to discover! It just describes the belief that biological laws are harder to discover. But that's not supported by the passage. Philosophers are wary of biology precisely because, as you say, it's apparently not governed by immutable laws. This answer actually contradicts the passage by suggesting that philosophers believe those laws are there, just harder to find.

(E), on the other hand, gets the job done because philosophers' affinity for physics does depend on the nature of the phenomena studied; specifically, the fact that these phenomena can be described by universal, immutable laws.

(B), (C), and (D) are pretty easy to eliminate: they're all way out of scope, not mentioned at all in the passage.

Does that answer your question?

[trevor.lovell]

Yes, it definitely helps. It does make sense to me now that I should have eliminated A based on the word "harder".

I read the word to mean not so much that it would be more arduous to discover laws governing biology, but rather that one has to stretch logic in order to fit a rule to biology, making it less appealing to the philosophers described in the passage. That interpretation was itself probably something of a stretch.

[Nina]

from where in the passage can we infer that laws in biology are impossible to discover? i'm a little bit confused since i only found in the first paragraph saying that "at the heart of this preference is a mistrust of uncertainty", can we infer from it that philosophers of science think laws of biology are impossible to discover?

Thanks a lot!