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  1. Integrating Multicellular Systems: Physiological Control and Degrees of Biological Individuality.Leonardo Bich - 2023 - Acta Biotheoretica 72 (1):1-22.
    This paper focuses on physiological integration in multicellular systems, a notion often associated with biological individuality, but which has not received enough attention and needs a thorough theoretical treatment. Broadly speaking, physiological integration consists in how different components come together into a cohesive unit in which they are dependent on one another for their existence and activity. This paper argues that physiological integration can be understood by considering how the components of a biological multicellular system are controlled and coordinated in (...)
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  • There Are No Intermediate Stages: An Organizational View on Development.Leonardo Bich & Derek Skillings - 2023 - In Matteo Mossio (ed.), Organization in Biology. Springer. pp. 241-262.
    Theoretical accounts of development exhibit several internal tensions and face multiple challenges. They span from the problem of the identification of the temporal boundaries of development (beginning and end) to the characterization of the distinctive type of change involved compared to other biological processes. They include questions such as the role to ascribe to the environment or what types of biological systems can undergo development and whether they should include colonies or even ecosystems. In this chapter we discuss these conceptual (...)
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  • Functional Integration and Individuality in Prokaryotic Collective Organisations.Guglielmo Militello, Leonardo Bich & Alvaro Moreno - 2020 - Acta Biotheoretica (3):391-415.
    Both physiological and evolutionary criteria of biological individuality are underpinned by the idea that an individual is a functionally integrated whole. However, a precise account of functional integration has not been provided so far, and current notions are not developed in the details, especially in the case of composite systems. To address this issue, this paper focuses on the organisational dimension of two representative associations of prokaryotes: biofilms and the endosymbiosis between prokaryotes. Some critical voices have been raised against the (...)
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  • Understanding Multicellularity: The Functional Organization of the Intercellular Space.Leonardo Bich, Thomas Pradeu & Jean-Francois Moreau - 2019 - Frontiers in Physiology 10.
    The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to understand how multicellular systems realize functionally integrated physiological entities by organizing their intercellular space. From a perspective centered on physiology and integration, biological systems are often characterized as organized in such a way that they realize metabolic self-production and self-maintenance. The existence and activity of their components rely on the network they realize and on the continuous management of the exchange of matter and energy with their environment. One (...)
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  • (1 other version)Robustness and autonomy in biological systems: how regulatory mechanisms enable functional integration, complexity and minimal cognition through the action of second-order control constraints.Leonardo Bich - 2018 - In Marta Bertolaso, Silvia Caianiello & Emanuele Serrelli (eds.), Biological Robustness. Emerging Perspectives from within the Life Sciences. Cham: Springer. pp. 123-147.
    Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals and (...)
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  • Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):797-817.
    The definition of biological individuality is one of the most discussed topics in philosophy of biology, but current debate has focused almost exclusively on evolution-based accounts. Moreover, several participants in this debate consider the notions of a biological individual and an organism as equivalent. In this paper, I show that the debates would be considerably enriched and clarified if philosophers took into account two elements. First, physiological fields are crucial for the understanding of biological individuality. Second, the category of biological (...)
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  • Autonomy and Enactivism: Towards a Theory of Sensorimotor Autonomous Agency.Xabier E. Barandiaran - 2017 - Topoi 36 (3):409-430.
    The concept of “autonomy”, once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind, is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor accounts of cognition cannot ignore: they provide a naturalized account of normativity and the resources to ground the identity of a cognitive subject in its specific mode of organization. There are, however, good reasons for the contemporary neglect (...)
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  • Biological regulation: controlling the system from within.Leonardo Bich, Matteo Mossio, Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo & Alvaro Moreno - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (2):237-265.
    Biological regulation is what allows an organism to handle the effects of a perturbation, modulating its own constitutive dynamics in response to particular changes in internal and external conditions. With the central focus of analysis on the case of minimal living systems, we argue that regulation consists in a specific form of second-order control, exerted over the core regime of production and maintenance of the components that actually put together the organism. The main argument is that regulation requires a distinctive (...)
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  • Pathways to pluralism about biological individuality.Beckett Sterner - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):609-628.
    What are the prospects for a monistic view of biological individuality given the multiple epistemic roles the concept must satisfy? In this paper, I examine the epistemic adequacy of two recent accounts based on the capacity to undergo natural selection. One is from Ellen Clarke, and the other is by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Clarke’s position reflects a strong monism, in that she aims to characterize individuality in purely functional terms and refrains from privileging any specific material properties as important in their (...)
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  • Genidentity and Biological Processes.Thomas Pradeu - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an (...)
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  • Kinds of Biological Individuals: Sortals, Projectibility, and Selection.DiFrisco James - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):845-875.
    Individuality is an important concept in biology, yet there are many non-equivalent criteria of individuality expressed in different kinds of biological individuals. This article evaluates these different kinds in terms of their capacity to support explanatory generalizations over the systems they individuate. Viewing the problem of individuality from this perspective promotes a splitting strategy in which different kinds make different epistemic trade-offs that suit them for different explanatory roles. I argue that evolutionary individuals, interpreted as forming a functional kind, face (...)
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  • Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio: Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry: Springer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands 2015, 222 pp, ISBN 978-94-017-9836-5.Bernd Rosslenbroich - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (4):591-601.
    The essay review summarizes the intention as well as some of the major topics from the book of A. Moreno and M. Mossio and discusses them against the background of recent considerations on the general understanding of organisms. The authors see themselves in the organicist tradition in biology and propose that a new understanding of living beings can be developed around the notion of organismic autonomy, which enables biological systems to maintain themselves in an environment through directed behavior.
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  • Multicellular agency: an organizational view.Argyris Arnellos & Alvaro Moreno - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (3):333-357.
    We argue that the transition from unicellular to multicellular systems raises important conceptual challenges for understanding agency. We compare several MC systems displaying different forms of collective behavior, and we analyze whether these actions can be considered organismically integrated and attributable to the whole. We distinguish between a ‘constitutive’ and an ‘interactive’ dimension of organizational complexity, and we argue that MC agency requires a radical entanglement between the related processes which we call “the constitutive-interactive closure principle”. We explain in detail (...)
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  • Demarcating cognition: the cognitive life sciences.Fred Keijzer - 2020 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 1):137-157.
    This paper criticizes the role of intuition-based ascriptions of cognition that are closely related to the ascription of mind. This practice hinders the explication of a clear and stable target domain for the cognitive sciences. To move forward, the proposal is to cut the notion of cognition free from such ascriptions and the intuition-based judgments that drive them. Instead, cognition is reinterpreted and developed as a scientific concept that is tied to a material domain of research. In this reading, cognition (...)
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  • (1 other version)Morir para vivir. La muerte celular como proceso regulador.María Belén Campero, Cristián Favre & Cristian Saborido - forthcoming - Theoria. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science.
    Usually, the organization of living systems is explained by appealing to an intrinsic purpose that is based on the biological survival. However, paradigmatically, it is inevitable to observe that the final destiny of all living organisms is death. In this work, we defend that, from an organizational approach, there is a form of death—Regulatory Cell Death—that, far from being a mere "absence of life", is a process of biological regulation and a feature of self-maintenance in multicellular organisms.
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  • Revising the Superorganism: An Organizational Approach to Complex Eusociality.Mark Canciani, Argyris Arnellos & Alvaro Moreno - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    Eusociality is broadly defined as: colonies consisting of overlapping generations, cooperative brood care, and a reproductive division of labour where sterile (or non-reproductive) workers help the reproductive members. Colonies of many complex eusocial insect species (e.g. ants, bees, termites) exhibit traits, at the collective level, that are more analogous to biological individuals rather than to groups. Indeed, due to this, colonies of the most complex species are typically a unit of selection, which has led many authors to once again apply (...)
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  • Biological Autonomy: Can a Universal and Gradable Conception be Operationalized?Argyris Arnellos - 2016 - Biological Theory 11 (1):11-24.
    In On the Origin of Autonomy; A New look at the Major Transitions in Evolution, Bernd Rosslenbroich argues that an increase of the relative autonomy of individual organisms is one of the central large-scale patterns in evolution. I begin by presenting how Rosslenbroich understands the notion of autonomy in biology and how he correlates its increase to different sets of morphological, physiological, and behavioral characteristics of various biological systems. I briefly discuss his view of directionality in evolution with respect to (...)
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