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Johnston and Gottlieb ( 1990), who also approach de­ and the causal irrelevance of the boundaries of organisms. In Our Genes, Rose, Lewontin alienation is not only a character istic of theories that see develop­ velopment in a constructionist way, even emphasize that their theory ment as an unfolding determined by internal factors. It is also per­ focuses on the organism. Oyama, too, has insisted on doing justice sistent in those "interactionist" views which see evolution and devel­ to the organism as an active agent, deploring a biology in which the opment as a process of trial and error, or challenge and response, individual looks like an abstract nexus of inner and outer causation.

In some respects indeed, it is consistent with the reliability of the process. a constructionist approach that organisms are central: phenotypes But, says Oyama, while predictability is an epistemological notion, that contingency is ontological, it concerns the nature of processes. These the approach stresses. As units of activity they can change in nongenetic different notions need not coincide; in fact, it is better to distinguish (organisms) instead of gene frequencies are the units of activity yet evolutionary significant ways, for example by taking on new habits.

Smith calls this the "new problem of genetics": "It seems that for any analysis (regardless of the criterion) which reveals genes as the true cause of a trait, there will be a complementary analysis showing the trait to be epigenetically caused" (Smith 1 992a, 347) . This is true, if it means that for any trait different explanatory questions can be asked and unprecise questions can be made more precise in different ways; selection of explanatory causes depends on the precise question one tries to answer, including its implicit ceteris paribus assumptions.