Would status as a big tent theory disqualify a theory from science?
A. No. I mean, I think that’s an important point to bring to bear here, because what basically I am trying to challenge is not that one shouldn’t have big tent theories. Big tent theories are, in fact, part of what it takes to unify fields that do start off very different. That’s not surprising. One is always looking for higher levels of abstraction and stuff like that. But the value of it at the end of the day comes as a kind of, you might say, what we say in philosophy of science as a metaphysical research program, and that is, in fact, how I would describe the neo-Darwinian synthesis, a metaphysical research program in biology that suggests some very interesting ways of understanding and interpreting phenomena in many different disciplines that otherwise would have very little to do with each other.
