Although it may seem like a truism to assert that biology is the science that studies organisms, during the second half of the twentieth century the organism category disappeared from biological theory. Over the past decade, however, biology has begun to witness the return of the organism as a fundamental explanatory concept. There are three major causes: (a) the realization that the Modern Synthesis does not provide a fully satisfactory understanding of evolution; (b) the growing awareness of the limits of (...) reductionism in molecular biology; and (c) the renewed interest in the nature of life as a genuine scientific problem. This essay examines these recent developments and considers the new epistemological roles being played by the organism in each of them. It also reflects on what the present resurgence of the organism means for the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

In 1960, American parasitologist Don Eyles was unexpectedly infected with a malariaparasite isolated from a macaque. He and his supervisor, G. Robert Coatney of the National Institutes of Health, had started this series of experiments with the assumption that humans were not susceptible to “monkey malaria.” The revelation that a mosquito carrying a macaque parasite could infect a human raised a whole range of public health and biological questions. This paper follows Coatney’s team of parasitologists and their subjects: from the (...) human to the nonhuman; from the American laboratory to the forests of Malaysia; and between the domains of medical research and natural history. In the course of this research, Coatney and his colleagues inverted Koch’s postulate, by which animal subjects are used to identify and understand human parasites. In contrast, Coatney’s experimental protocol used human subjects to identify and understand monkey parasites. In so doing, the team repeatedly followed malaria parasites across the purported boundary separating monkeys and humans, a practical experience that created a sense of biological symmetry between these separate species. Ultimately, this led Coatney and his colleagues make evolutionary inferences, concluding “that monkeys and man are more closely related than some of us wish to admit.” In following monkeys, men, and malaria across biological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries, this paper offers a new historical narrative, demonstrating that the pursuit of public health agendas can fuel the expansion of evolutionary knowledge. (shrink)

Observation and experiment as categories for analysing scientific practice have a long pedigree in writings on science. There has, however, been little attempt to delineate observation and experiment with respect to analysing scientific practice; in particular, scientific experimentation, in a systematic manner. Someone who has presented a systematic account of observation and experiment as categories for analysing scientific experimentation is Ian Hacking. In this paper, I present a detailed analysis of Hacking’s observation versus experiment account. Using a range of cases (...) from various fields of scientific enquiry, I argue that the observation versus experiment account is not an adequate framework for delineating scientific experimentation in a systematic manner. (shrink)

The way people come to report private stimulation arising within their own bodies is not well understood. Although the Darwinian assumption of biological continuity has been the basis of extensive animal modeling for many human biological and behavioral phenomena, few have attempted to model human communication based on private stimulation. This target article discusses such an animal model using concepts and methods derived from the study of discriminative stimulus effects of drugs and recent research on interanimal communication. We discuss how (...) humans acquire the capacity to identify and report private stimulation and we analyze intra- and interspecies differences in neurochemical mechanisms for transducing interoceptive stimuli, enzymatic and other metabolic factors, learning ability, and discrimination learning histories and their relation to psychiatric and developmental disabilities. (shrink)

The paper links a debate in the history of medical science between statistics and the experimental method with contemporary diabetes educational practices. An empirical example of a tension between neglect and concern in diabetes self-regulation frames the subsequent theoretical discussion between first, Claude Bernard and statistics and afterwards, Georges Canguilhem as a correlative to Bernard. Through these philosophers of medical science a connection between the experimental method and education is demonstrated. Finally, a case description of an experimental approach to alcohol (...) and experimentation frames and highlights the educational aspect of the methodological discussion. (shrink)

All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own context. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent larger (...) organism. In this paper I synthesize ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology toward a hypothesis about the origin of Individuality: “Scale-Free Cognition”. I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization, and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents. Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition. I hypothesize that higher-level goal-directed activity and agency, resulting in larger cognitive boundaries, evolve from the primal homeostatic drive of living things to reduce stress – the difference between current conditions and life-optimal conditions. The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggests a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the drive of infotaxis. Recent data on the molecular mechanisms of pre-neural bioelectricity suggest a model of how increasingly sophisticated cognitive functions emerge smoothly from cell-cell communication used to guide embryogenesis and regeneration. This set of hypotheses provides a novel perspective on numerous phenomena, such as cancer, and makes several unique, testable predictions for interdisciplinary research that have implications not only for evolutionary developmental biology but also for biomedicine and perhaps artificial intelligence and exobiology. (shrink)

Knowledge-making practices in biology are being strongly affected by the availability of data on an unprecedented scale, the insistence on systemic approaches and growing reliance on bioinformatics and digital infrastructures. What role does theory play within data-intensive science, and what does that tell us about scientific theories in general? To answer these questions, I focus on Open Biomedical Ontologies, digital classification tools that have become crucial to sharing results across research contexts in the biological and biomedical sciences, and argue that (...) they constitute an example of classificatory theory. This form of theorizing emerges from classification practices in conjunction with experimental know-how and expresses the knowledge underpinning the analysis and interpretation of data disseminated online. (shrink)

This essay recognizes that the interactions that define medical care are problematic and that narrative is invoked to overcome these strains. Being grounded in science, medicine, too, might be influenced by a particular world-view that arose in the natural philosophy of the Scientific Revolution. If narrative responds to this sort of medicine, it may retain traces of this mindset. A feminist approach responds to this viewpoint and may used beneficially to analyze both the story of medicine and the stories within (...) medicine. Tensions discussed from this perspective are those between sickness and health and those between patient and provider; also questioned are suitable form(s) of narrative and whose narratives are valued. Suggestions for broadening narrative to address these issues include letting the body speak for itself, overcoming the power differential in the patient/provider interaction and using standpoints to foster a more equal and just medical system. (shrink)

Biomedical researchers claim there is significant biomedical information about humans which can be discovered only through experiments on intact animal systems (AMA p. 2). Although epidemiological studies, computer simulations, clinical investigation, and cell and tissue cultures have become important weapons in the biomedical scientists' arsenal, these are primarily "adjuncts to the use of animals in research" (Sigma Xi p. 76). Controlled laboratory experiments are the core of the scientific enterprise. Biomedical researchers claim these should be conducted on intact biological systems, (...) whole animals. By observing the effects of various stimuli in non-human animals, we can form legitimate expectations about the likely effects of these stimuli in humans. Perhaps more importantly, we can understand the biomedical condition's causal mechanisms. (shrink)

Claude Bernard, the father of scientific physiology, believed that if medicine was to become truly scientiifc, it would have to be based on rigorous and controlled animal experiments. Bernard instituted a paradigm which has shaped physiological practice for most of the twentieth century. ln this paper we examine how Bernards commitment to hypothetico-deductivism and determinism led to (a) his rejection of the theory of evolution; (b) his minima/ization of the role of clinical medicine and epidemiological studies; and (c) his conclusion (...) that experiments on nonhuman animals were, "entirely conclusive for the toxicology and hygiene of man". We examine some negative consequences of Bernardianism for twentieth century medicine, and argue that physio/ogy's continued adherence to Bernardianism has caused it to diverge from the other biological sciences which have become increasingly infused with evolutionary theory. (shrink)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the advent of widespread pet ownership was accompanied by claims of heightened animal abilities. Psychical researchers investigated many of these claims, including animal telepathy and ghostly apparitions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, news of horses and dogs with the ability to read and calculate fascinated the French public and scientists alike. Amidst questions about the justification of animal cruelty in laboratory experiments, wonder animals came to represent some extraordinary possibilities associated (...) with their kind. Psychologists speculated on the feats of wonder animals. They considered the possibility that these animals shared consciousness and intelligence with humans, and that—if confirmed—their alleged amazing abilities could lead to a new understanding of cognition for all animals. This article focuses on the few years during which claims of wonder animals occupied a significant place in French psychology and psychical research. It argues that as explanations involving deception or unconscious cues gained increased acceptance, the interest in wonder animals soon led to a backlash in comparative psychology that had repercussions for all animals, particularly those used in experimentation, in that it contributed to the decline of research addressing cognitive abilities in non-human species. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon (...) 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself. (shrink)

The word “sustainable” débuted in 1987 but has since become a hot topic issue, both for scientific research and wider society. Although sustainability may appear to be a thoroughly twenty-first century goal, sustainability science concepts and goals such as balance, endurance, order and change, reach back at least as far as the proto-scientific investigations of alchemy. Both alchemy and sustainability science can be understood as systems or strategies which individuals and societies can use to organise and manage themselves in a (...) complex world filled with dynamic problems. Alchemy never created a panacea or transmuted base metals into gold because those goals proved to be based on fundamentally flawed theories and premises. Nevertheless, alchemy did succeed in helping adherents manage themselves and their societies in advantageous ways. Alchemy also positively and significantly influenced subsequent scientific development. Likewise, science helps humanity manage itself on multiple scales, from the individual to the international, and will certainly contribute to further scientific research and development. However, it is not yet known whether carbon neutrality, entirely renewable energy and other sustainability goals will be achieved or whether these goals will also come to be seen as based on flawed understandings and theories. For this reason, this article explores key features of alchemy, traces how they persisted through Enlightenment-era science and how they continue to be present and influential within scientific efforts today. The article goes on to reflect on how the history, development and continued use of concepts such as balance, endurance, order and change may be useful portents of how humans and human society will manage themselves in the future. Such reflections may also temper the zeal with which individuals that accept or reject sustainability goals treat each other, thereby offering a way for divergent groups to manage their interactions. Flawed theories prevented alchemy from achieving many of its primary stated goals. However, alchemy was very beneficial, both during its period of use and subsequently through its influence on subsequent development. This article identifies ideas from alchemy that were originally beneficial and that have persisted through Enlightenment-era science and into contemporary science. The article also explores how those ideas continue to influence scientific and sustainability goals today. Understanding and reflecting on alchemy’s successes and failures facilitates reflection on the potential successes and failures of sustainability and the human consequences of trying to manage a sustainable future. (shrink)

Background: The experimental method to acquire knowledge about efficacy and efficiency of medical procedures is well established in evidence-based medicine. A method to attain evidence about the significance of diseases and interventions from the patients' perspectives taking into account their right to self-determination about their lives and bodies has however not been sufficiently characterized.Design: Identification of a method to acquire evidence about the clinical significance of disease and therapeutic options from the patients' perspectives.Arguments: Communication between patient and physician is analyzed (...) as the method to attain evidence about what is at stake for individual patients in disease and therapy. It is the method that enables physicians to directly take into account patients' disease experiences and their aims regarding treatments. These patients' perspectives in turn determine the clinical significance of diagnoses and therapeutic options, if patient-autonomy is taken seriously.Conclusions: A full account of evidence-based medicine needs to include experimentation and communication between physician and patient as equally important methods to attain evidence necessary to practice patient-oriented medicine. The communicative method is especially important for primary physicians as they direct patients within the medical system to have their medical problems most effectively and efficiently addressed. (shrink)

Popper, Polanyi and Duncker represent the widely held position that theoretical and experimental scientific research are motivated by problems to which discoveries are solutions. According to the argument here, their views are unsupported and - in light of counter-instances, anomalous chance discoveries, and the force of curiosity - over-generalized.

Born in 1918 in New York, awarded a doctorate in analytical chemistry (1944), Leonard K. Nash enjoyed a distinguished career at Harvard, holding a chair of chemistry from 1959 to 1986. Conducting research in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Nash authored successful textbooks, some of which remain in print (e.g. Elements of Chemical Thermodynamics, and Elements of Statistical Thermodynamics).This essay describes the theory of science that Nash developed in a book he published in 1963, The Nature of the Natural Sciences. The (...) present author is of the view that Nash's neglected theory is worth retrieving, as one that is likely to kindle the interest of historians of metascience on several counts. Part of .. (shrink)

Proponents of evidence-based medicine and some philosophers of science seem to agree that knowledge of mechanisms can help solve the problem of applying results of controlled studies to target populations (‘the problem of extrapolation’). We describe the problem of extrapolation, characterize mechanisms, and outline how mechanistic knowledge might be used to solve the problem. Our main thesis is that there are four often overlooked problems with using mechanistic knowledge to solve the problem of extrapolation. First, our understanding of mechanisms is (...) often (and arguably, likely to remain) incomplete. Secondly, knowledge of mechanisms is not always applicable outside the tightly controlled laboratory conditions in which it is gained. Thirdly, mechanisms can behave paradoxically. Fourthly, as Daniel Steel points out, using mechanistic knowledge faces the problem of the ‘extrapolator’s circle’. At the same time, when the problems with mechanistic knowledge have been addressed, such knowledge can and should be used to mitigate (nothing can entirely solve) the problem of extrapolation. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have insisted that evidence of underlying mechanisms is required to support claims about the effects of medical interventions. Yet evidence about mechanisms does not feature on dominant evidence-based medicine “hierarchies.” After arguing that only inferences from mechanisms (“mechanistic reasoning”)—not mechanisms themselves—count as evidence, I argue for a middle ground. Mechanistic reasoning is not required to establish causation when we have high-quality controlled studies; moreover, mechanistic reasoning is more problematic than has been assumed. Yet where the problems can (...) be overcome, mechanistic reasoning can and should be used as evidence. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of experimental error. The prevalent view that experimental errors can be dismissed as a tiresome but trivial blemish on the method of experimentation is criticized. It is stressed that the occurrence of errors in experiments constitutes a permanent feature of the attempt to test theories in the physical world, and this feature deserves proper attention. It is suggested that a classification of types of experimental error may be useful as a heuristic device in (...) studying the nature of these errors. However, the standard classification of systematic and random errors is mathematically based does not focus on the causes of the errors, their origins, or the contexts in which they arise. A new typology of experimental errors is therefore proposed whose criterion is epistemological. This typology reflects the various stages that can be discerned in the execution of an experiment, each stage constituting a category of a certain type of experimental error. The proposed classification consists of four categories which are illustrated by historical cases. (shrink)

Science traditionally is taught as a linear process based on logic and carried out by objective researchers following the scientific method. Practice of science is a far more nuanced enterprise, one in which intuition and passion become just as important as objectivity and logic. Whether the activity is committing to study a particular research problem, drawing conclusions about a hypothesis under investigation, choosing whether to count results as data or experimental noise, or deciding what information to present in a research (...) paper, ethical challenges inevitably will arise because of the ambiguities inherent in practice. Unless these ambiguities are acknowledged and their sources understood explicitly, responsible conduct of science education will not adequately prepare the individuals receiving the training for the kinds of decisions essential to research integrity that they will have to make as scientists. (shrink)

Many biologists appeal to the so-called Krogh principle when justifying their choice of experimental organisms. The principle states that “for a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice, or a few such animals, on which it can be most conveniently studied”. Despite its popularity, the principle is often critiqued for implying unwarranted generalizations from optimal models. We argue that the Krogh principle should be interpreted in relation to the historical and scientific contexts in which it has (...) been developed and used. We interpret the Krogh Principle as a heuristic, i.e., as a recommendation to approach biological problems through organisms where a specific trait or physiological mechanism is expected to be most distinctively displayed or most experimentally accessible. We designate these organisms “Krogh organisms.” We clarify the differences between uses of model organisms and non-standard Krogh organisms. Among these is the use of Krogh organisms as “negative models” in biomedical research, where organisms are chosen for their dissimilarity to human physiology. Importantly, the representational scope of Krogh organisms and the generalizability of their characteristics are not fixed or assumed but explored through experimental studies. Research on Krogh organisms is steeped in the comparative method characteristic of zoology and comparative physiology, in which studies of biological variation produce insights into general physiological constraints. Accordingly, we conclude that the Krogh principle exemplifies the advantages of studying biological variation as a strategy to produce generalizable insights. (shrink)

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) rank as two of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. Renowned for their experiments, lectures, and writing, Bernard and du Bois-Reymond earned great prestige as professors of physiology in a time when Paris and Berlin reigned as capitals of science. Yet even though they were equals in every way, du Bois-Reymond’s reputation has fallen far more than Bernard’s. This essay compares aspects of the two men’s attitudes to philosophy, history, and (...) biology in an attempt to explain why Bernard remains the better known. The answer lies less in the value of du Bois-Reymond’s contributions than in the way that science is remembered in France and Germany. (shrink)

InThe Education of the Human Race, G. E. Lessing helps his readers understand why the propositions of the Old Testament are pseudo-propositions, or why they do not resemble the significant propositions of natural science but thetautologicalpropositions of mathematics and of logic. That is, the so-called propositions of the Old Testament do not teach readers whether what actually happens is this or that; rather what they teach us is to imagine expressions by substitution in such a way as to throw their (...) structure into relief. One of Lessing's most attentive readers was Wittgenstein. Or perhaps only Wittgenstein would have been able to grasp so immediately Lessing's insight that the tautological or pseudo-propositions of the Old Testament invite thinkingonlywhen readers use them to understand ‘what is the case’ in the pictures the propositions have – logically – constructed. Thus in this essay I use Wittgenstein's reading of Lessing to throw light on his work in theTractatus. Rather than take up the new logician's interest in completely analyzing expressions, Wittgenstein insists in theTractatusthat the expressions we use, even those that seem to be propositions or that contain assertions, are in fact designed to be elucidatorywithoutsaying anything about the nature of the subjects that figure in them. Wittgenstein's great insight was to see that the propositional signs of our language are able to bring something to mindwithoutsaying what is a representation of what. (shrink)

In 1948 Ludwik Fleck published a paper in Polish discussing the use of humans in medical experiments, thereby addressing his peers. Though the paper has so far not been translated or studied, it has been taken to indicate Fleck’s deep commitment to ethical questions, notably the question of informed consent. In being written by a former victim of the Nazi policy and a survivor of the Holocaust also acting as an expert witness in the trial of the IG Farben in (...) Nuremberg, the paper is of interest. A scrutiny of Fleck’s text and related sources discloses, however, not only the complexity of the issue at the centre of the Nuremberg trial, but also Fleck’s unexpected stance in seemingly adducing his arguments from both the German defendants and the prosecution, heavily informed by US scientists. Further, the contentious discussion of the past in Fleck’s paper reveals its links to modern bioethical discussion. Though sometimes oblivious of that past, it still faces the same questions. (shrink)

Nietzsche assesses values, moralities, religions, cultures, and persons in terms of health. He argues that we should reject those that are unhealthy and develop healthier alternatives. But what is Nietzsche’s conception of health, and why should it carry such normative force? In this paper I argue for reading Nietzsche’s concept of health as the overall ability to meet the demands of one’s motivational landscape. I show that, unlike other interpretations, this reading accounts for his rejection of particular features of a (...) prevailing, then as now, model of health; for his association of health with strength and with psychic unity; and for his claim that health is compatible with, and can even be enhanced by, functional impairments such as those from which he personally suffered. Throughout I draw connections to recent literature on health and disability. (shrink)

Defenders of evolutionary medicine claim that medical professionals and public health officials would do well to consider the role of evolutionary biology with respect to the teaching, research, and judgments pertaining to medical theory and practice. An integral part of their argument is that the human body should be understood as a bundle of evolutionary compromises. Such an appreciation, which includes a proper understanding of biological function and physiological homeostasis, would provide a crucial perspective regarding the understanding and securing of (...) human health needs currently lacking in the medical arena. (shrink)