ABSTRACT
What remains then, that is useful and true, out of the variety of analogies made between biology and the applied arts? It will help to clarify matters if the answer to this question is divided into two parts, the one concerned with history, the other with science. Indeed the confusion as to whether a theory of the design of artefacts should or could be a scientific as opposed to a historical theory is something which has bedevilled biological analogies since they were first formulated – as this account has, I hope, shown. In making this division I propose to differentiate between history and science in terms of the actual, as against the possible. As W. C. Kneale has said,
it seems possible to maintain that science should be distinguished from history (in the largest sense of that word), not as the study of universal truths from the study of singular truths, but rather as the study of what is possible or impossible from the study of what has been or actually is the case. Speaking metaphorically, we may say that science is about the frame of nature, while history is about the content.1
