Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. On the very idea of biological individuality.Samir Okasha - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Death as the Cessation of an Organism and the Moral Status Alternative.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak - 2023 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 48 (5):504-518.
    The mainstream concept of death—the biological one—identifies death with the cessation of an organism. In this article, I challenge the mainstream position, showing that there is no single well-established concept of an organism and no universal concept of death in biological terms. Moreover, some of the biological views on death, if applied in the context of bedside decisions, might imply unacceptable consequences. I argue the moral concept of death—one similar to that of Robert Veatch—overcomes such difficulties. The moral view identifies (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Individual differences, uniqueness, and individuality in behavioural ecology.Rose Trappes - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 96 (C):18-26.
    In this paper I develop a concept of behavioural ecological individuality. Using findings from a case study which employed qualitative methods, I argue that individuality in behavioural ecology should be defined as phenotypic and ecological uniqueness, a concept that is operationalised in terms of individual differences such as animal personality and individual specialisation. This account make sense of how the term “individuality” is used in relation to intrapopulation variation in behavioural ecology. The concept of behavioural ecological individuality can sometimes be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Pregnancy, Parthood and Proper Overlap: A Critique of Kingma.Alexander Geddes - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):476-491.
    Elselijn Kingma argues that, in cases of mammalian placental pregnancy, the foster (roughly, the post-implantation embryo/foetus) is part of the gravida (the pregnant organism). But she does not consider the possibility of proper overlap. I show that this generates a number of serious problems for her argument and trace the oversight to a quite general issue within the literature on biological individuality. Doing so provides an opportunity to pull apart and clarify the relations between some importantly distinct questions concerning organismality (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • (1 other version)Biological Individuality and the Foetus Problem.William Morgan - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):799-816.
    The Problem of Biological Individuality is the problem of how to count organisms. Whilst counting organisms may seem easy, the biological world is full of difficult cases such as colonial siphonophores and aspen tree groves. One of the main solutions to the Problem of Biological Individuality is the Physiological Approach. Drawing on an argument made by Eric Olson in the personal identity debate, I argue that the Physiological Approach faces a metaphysical problem - the ‘Foetus Problem’. This paper illustrates how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Scaffolding Natural Selection.Walter Veit - 2022 - Biological Theory 17 (2):163-180.
    Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • One or two? A Process View of pregnancy.Anne Sophie Meincke - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1495-1521.
    How many individuals are present where we see a pregnant individual? Within a substance ontological framework, there are exactly two possible answers to this question. The standard answer—two individuals—is typically championed by scholars endorsing the predominant Containment View of pregnancy, according to which the foetus resides in the gestating organism like in a container. The alternative answer—one individual—has recently found support in the Parthood View, according to which the foetus is a part of the gestating organism. Here I propose a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today.Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, Sean Aas, Dan Brudney, Jessica Flanigan, S. Matthew Liao, Alex London, Wayne Sumner & Julian Savulescu - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 22 (12):10-21.
    In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • Do Somatic Cells Really Sacrifice Themselves? Why an Appeal to Coercion May be a Helpful Strategy in Explaining the Evolution of Multicellularity.Adrian Stencel & Javier Suárez - 2021 - Biological Theory 16 (2):102-113.
    An understanding of the factors behind the evolution of multicellularity is one of today’s frontiers in evolutionary biology. This is because multicellular organisms are made of one subset of cells with the capacity to transmit genes to the next generation and another subset responsible for maintaining the functionality of the organism, but incapable of transmitting genes to the next generation. The question arises: why do somatic cells sacrifice their lives for the sake of germline cells? How is germ/soma separation maintained? (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Broadening the problem agenda of biological individuality: individual differences, uniqueness and temporality.Rose Trappes & Marie I. Kaiser - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-28.
    Biological individuality is a notoriously thorny topic for biologists and philosophers of biology. In this paper we argue that biological individuality presents multiple, interconnected questions for biologists and philosophers that together form a problem agenda. Using a case study of an interdisciplinary research group in ecology, behavioral and evolutionary biology, we claim that a debate on biological individuality that seeks to account for diverse practices in the biological sciences should be broadened to include and give prominence to questions about uniqueness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Pregnant Females as Historical Individuals: An Insight From the Philosophy of Evo-Devo.Laura Nuño de la Rosa, Mihaela Pavličev & Arantza Etxeberria - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:572106.
    Criticisms of the “container” model of pregnancy picturing female and embryo as separate entities multiply in various philosophical and scientific contexts during the last decades. In this paper, we examine how this model underlies received views of pregnancy in evolutionary biology, in the characterization of the transition from oviparity to viviparity in mammals and in the selectionist explanations of pregnancy as an evolutionary strategy. In contrast, recent evo-devo studies on eutherian reproduction, including the role of inflammation and new maternal cell (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Biological Individuality, Pregnancy, and (Mammalian) Reproduction.Elselijn Kingma - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1037-1048.
    Mammals are usually considered unproblematic as biological individuals. This article contends the opposite. Once we consider pregnancy, criteria for biological individuality are not easily applicab...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Hegel's Philosophy of Biology? A Programmatic Overview.Andrea Gambarotto & Luca Illetterati - 2020 - Hegel Bulletin 41 (3):349-370.
    This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of theHegel Bulletinentirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Philosophy of immunology.Bartlomiej Swiatczak & Alfred I. Tauber - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2020.
    Philosophy of immunology is a subfield of philosophy of biology dealing with ontological and epistemological issues related to the studies of the immune system. While speculative investigations and abstract analyses have always been part of immune theorizing, until recently philosophers have largely ignored immunology. Yet the implications for understanding the philosophical basis of organismal functions framed by immunity offer new perspectives on fundamental questions of biology and medicine. Developed in the context of history of medicine, theoretical biology, and medical anthropology, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • What is a hologenomic adaptation? Emergent individuality and inter-identity in multispecies systems.Javier Suárez & Vanessa Triviño - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 187 (11).
    Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Prosthetic embodiment.Sean Aas - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6509-6532.
    What makes something a part of my body, for moral purposes? Is the body defined naturalistically: by biological relations, or psychological relations, or some combination of the two? This paper approaches this question by considering a borderline case: the status of prostheses. I argue that extant accounts of the body fail to capture prostheses as genuine body parts. Nor, however, do they provide plausible grounds for excluding prostheses, without excluding some paradigm organic parts in the process. I conclude by suggesting (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • The hologenome concept of evolution: a philosophical and biological study.Javier Suárez - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Exeter
    The hologenome concept of evolution is a hypothesis about the evolution of animals and plants. It asserts that the evolution of animals and plants was partially triggered by their interactions with their symbiotic microbiomes. In that vein, the hologenome concept posits that the holobiont (animal host + symbionts of the microbiome) is a unit of selection. -/- The hologenome concept has been severely criticized on the basis that selection on holobionts would only be possible if there were a tight transgenerational (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Biological Individuals.Robert A. Wilson & Matthew J. Barker - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Were You a Part of Your Mother?Elselijn Kingma - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):609-646.
    Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a part of the gestating organism. This paper proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the containment view is the received view; that it is generally assumed without good reason; and that it needs substantial support if it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  • Conjoined twinning & biological individuation.Alexandria Boyle - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2395-2415.
    In dicephalus conjoined twinning, it appears that two heads share a body; in cephalopagus, it appears that two bodies share a head. How many human animals are present in these cases? One answer is that there are two in both cases—conjoined twins are precisely that, conjoined twins. Another is that the number of humans corresponds to the number of bodies—so there is one in dicephalus and two in cephalopagus. I show that both of these answers are incorrect. Prominent accounts of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • A metaphysical approach to holobiont individuality: Holobionts as emergent individuals.Javier Suárez & Vanessa Triviño - 2019 - Quaderns de Filosofia 6 (1):59-76.
    Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a host plus its microbiome. The status of holobionts as individuals has recently been a subject of continuous controversy, which has given rise to two main positions: on the one hand, holobiont advocates argue that holobionts are biological individuals; on the other, holobiont detractors argue that they are just mere chimeras or ecological communities, but not individuals. Both parties in the dispute develop their arguments from the framework of the philosophy of biology, in terms (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Can the Epistemic Value of Natural Kinds Be Explained Independently of Their Metaphysics?Catherine Kendig & John Grey - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):359-376.
    The account of natural kinds as stable property clusters is premised on the possibility of separating the epistemic value of natural kinds from their underlying metaphysics. On that account, the co-instantiation of any sub-cluster of the properties associated with a given natural kind raises the probability of the co-instantiation of the rest, and this clustering of property instantiation is invariant under all relevant counterfactual perturbations. We argue that it is not possible to evaluate the stability of a cluster of properties (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Functional ecology's non-selectionist understanding of function.Antoine C. Dussault - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 70 (C):1-9.
    This paper reinforces the current consensus against the applicability of the selected effect theory of function in ecology. It does so by presenting an argument which, in contrast with the usual argument invoked in support of this consensus, is not based on claims about whether ecosystems are customary units of natural selection. Instead, the argument developed here is based on observations about the use of the function concept in functional ecology, and more specifically, research into the relationship between biodiversity and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • How Research on Microbiomes is Changing Biology: A Discussion on the Concept of the Organism.Adrian Stencel & Agnieszka M. Proszewska - 2018 - Foundations of Science 23 (4):603-620.
    Multicellular organisms contain numerous symbiotic microorganisms, collectively called microbiomes. Recently, microbiomic research has shown that these microorganisms are responsible for the proper functioning of many of the systems (digestive, immune, nervous, etc.) of multicellular organisms. This has inclined some scholars to argue that it is about time to reconceptualise the organism and to develop a concept that would place the greatest emphasis on the vital role of microorganisms in the life of plants and animals. We believe that, unfortunately, there is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Individuality and Aggregativity.Stéphane Chauvier - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (11).
    Why is there a specific problem with biological individuality? Because the living realm contains a wide range of exotic particular concrete entities that do not easily match our ordinary concept of an individual. Slime moulds, dandelions, siphonophores are among the Odd Entities that excite the ontological zeal of the philosophers of biology. Most of these philosophers, however, seem to believe that these Odd Cases oblige us to refine or revise our common concept of an individual. They think, explicitly or tacitly, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Evolution of Individuality: A Case Study in the Volvocine Green Algae.Erik R. Hanschen, Dinah R. Davison, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright & Richard E. Michod - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (3).
    All disciplines must define their basic units and core processes. In evolutionary biology, the core process is natural selection and the basic unit of selection and adaptation is the individual. To operationalize the theory of natural selection we must count individuals, as they are the bearers of fitness. While canonical individuals have often been taken to be multicellular organisms, the hierarchy of life shows that new kinds of individuals have evolved. A variety of criteria have been used to define biological (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Themen aus den Lebenswissenschaften.Marie I. Kaiser - 2017 - In Markus Andreas Schrenk (ed.), Handbuch Metaphysik (German). Stuttgart: Metzler.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)A trilemma for teleological individualism.John Basl - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1027-1029.
    This paper addresses the foundations of Teleological Individualism, the view that organisms, even non-sentient organisms, are goal-oriented systems while biological collectives, such as ecosystems or conspecific groups, are mere assemblages of organisms. Typical defenses of Teleological Individualism ground the teleological organization of organisms in the workings of natural selection. This paper shows that grounding teleological organization in natural selection is antithetical to Teleological Individualism because such views assume a view about the units of selection on which it is only individual (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   47 citations  
  • The many faces of biological individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):761-773.
    Biological individuality is a major topic of discussion in biology and philosophy of biology. Recently, several objections have been raised against traditional accounts of biological individuality, including the objections of monism, theory-centrism, ahistoricity, disciplinary isolationism, and the multiplication of conceptual uncertainties. In this introduction, I will examine the current philosophical landscape about biological individuality, and show how the contributions gathered in this special issue address these five objections. Overall, the aim of this issue is to offer a more diverse, unifying, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine.Jonathan Beever & Nicolae Morar - 2016 - American Journal of Bioethics 16 (2):34-45.
    The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Environmental Ethics.Roberta L. Millstein - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer.
    A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Plant individuality: a solution to the demographer’s dilemma.Ellen Clarke - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (3):321-361.
    The problem of plant individuality is something which has vexed botanists throughout the ages, with fashion swinging back and forth from treating plants as communities of individuals (Darwin 1800 ; Braun and Stone 1853 ; Münch 1938 ) to treating them as organisms in their own right, and although the latter view has dominated mainstream thought most recently (Harper 1977 ; Cook 1985 ; Ariew and Lewontin 2004 ), a lively debate conducted mostly in Scandinavian journals proves that the issues (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Situating physiology within evolutionary theory.Nathalie Gontier - forthcoming - Journal of Physiology.
    Traditionally defined as the science of the living, or as the field that beyond anatomical structure and bodily form studies functional organization and behaviour, physiology has long been excluded from evolutionary research. The main reason for this exclusion is that physiology has a presential and futuristic outlook on life, while evolutionary theory is traditionally defined as the study of natural history. In this paper, I re-evaluate these classic science divisions and situate physiology within the history of the evolutionary sciences, as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Kant’s Ongoing Relevance for Philosophy of Science.Andrew Jones & Andrew Cooper - 2023 - Kantian Review 28 (3):337-354.
    In this introductory article we reconstruct several broad developments in the scholarship on Kant’s theory of natural science with a particular focus on the Anglophone context over the past half-century. Our goal is to illuminate the co-development of Kant scholarship and the philosophy of science during this period and to identify points of influence in both directions. In section 2 we present an overview of the scholarship on Kant’s account of natural laws. In section 3 we survey the diverse interpretations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The ‘Whole’ Truth about Biological Individuality in Kant’s Account of Living Nature.Anna Frammartino Wilks - 2023 - Kantian Review 28 (3):429-446.
    Given the central place organisms occupy in Kant’s account of living nature, it might seem unlikely that his claims about biological wholes could be relevant to current debates over the problem of biological individuality. These debates acknowledge the multiple realizability of biological individuality in vastly different forms, including parts of organisms and complex groups of organisms at various levels of the biological hierarchy, sparking much controversy in attempts to characterize a biological individual. I argue that, far from being irrelevant to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • How many ways can you die? Multiple biological deaths as a consequence of the multiple concepts of an organism.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak & Adrian Stencel - 2022 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (2):127-154.
    According to the mainstream position in the bioethical definition of death debate, death is to be equated with the cessation of an organism. Given such a perspective, some bioethicists uphold the position that brain-dead patients are dead, while others claim that they are alive. Regardless of the specific opinion on the status of brain-dead patients, the mere bioethical concept of death, according to many bioethicists, has the merit of being unanimous and univocal, as well as grounded in biology. In the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Are Organisms Substances or Processes?William Morgan - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):605-619.
    In this paper, I argue that attempts in the philosophy of biology to show that organisms are processes rather than substances fail. Despite what process ontologists have said, I argue that substance ontology is perfectly able to accommodate the dynamic nature of organisms, their ecological dependence, and their vague boundaries, and that their criticisms are not directed at substance ontology simpliciter, but only at specific (perhaps untenable) characterisations of substances. The paper ends by considering what a processual philosophy of biology (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Is Wilson’s religion Durkheim’s, or Hobbes’s Leviathan?Andrew R. Atkinson - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-19.
    This paper critically supports the modern evolutionary explanation of religion popularised by David Sloan Wilson, by comparing it with those of his predecessors, namely Emile Durkheim and Thomas Hobbes, and to some biological examples which seem analogous to religions as kinds of superorganisms in their own right. The aim of the paper is to draw out a theoretical pedigree in philosophy and sociology that is reflected down the lines of various other evolutionarily minded contributors on the subject of religion. The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Cancer.Anya Plutynski - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Cancer—and scientific research on cancer—raises a variety of compelling philosophical questions. This entry will focus on four topics, which philosophers of science have begun to explore and debate. First, scientific classifications of cancer have as yet failed to yield a unified taxonomy. There is a diversity of classificatory schemes for cancer, and while some are hierarchical, others appear to be “cross-cutting,” or non-nested. This literature thus raises a variety of questions about the nature of the disease and disease classification. Second, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Functions and Health at the Interface of Biology and Technology.Elselijn Kingma - 2020 - Noûs 54 (1):182-203.
    Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Fitness and Individuality in Complex Life Cycles.Matthew D. Herron - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (5):828-834.
    Complex life cycles are common in the eukaryotic world, and they complicate the question of how to define individuality. Using a bottom-up, gene-centric approach, I consider the concept of fitness in the context of complex life cycles. I analyze the fitness effects of an allele on different biological units within a complex life history and how these effects drive evolutionary change within populations. Based on these effects, I attempt to construct a concept of fitness that accurately predicts evolutionary change in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Rethinking Cohesion and Species Individuality.Celso Neto - 2016 - Biological Theory 11 (3):01-12.
    According to the species-as-individuals thesis(hereafter S-A-I), species are cohesive entities. Barker and Wilson recently pointed out that the type of cohesion exhibited by species is fundamentally different from that of organisms (paradigmatic individuals), suggesting that species are homeostatic property cluster kinds. In this article, I propose a shift in how to approach cohesion in the context of S-A-I: instead of analyzing the different types of cohesion and questioning whether species have them, I focus on the role played by cohesion in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Is Aldo Leopold's 'Land Community' an Individual?Roberta L. Millstein - 2018 - In O. Bueno, R. Chen & M. B. Fagan (eds.), Individuation across Experimental and Theoretical Sciences. Oxford University Press. pp. 279-302.
    The “land community” (or “biotic community”) that features centrally in Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has typically been equated with the concept of “ecosystem.” Moreover, some have challenged this central Leopoldean concept given the multitude of meanings of the term “ecosystem” and the changes the term has undergone since Leopold’s time (see, e.g., Shrader-Frechette 1996). Even one of Leopold’s primary defenders, J. Baird Callicott, asserts that there are difficulties in identifying the boundaries of ecosystems and suggests that we recognize that their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Mitosis circumscribes individuals; sex creates new individuals.Root Gorelick - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (6):871-890.
    Many aspects of biology, such as population genetics and senescence, are predicated on identifying individuals and generations. Conventional demarcations of individuals and generations, such as physiological autonomy, unicellular bottlenecks, and alternation of generation, are rife with problems. Do physically separated cuttings or plant ramets constitute separate individuals or generations? Are chimaeras one or more individuals? To resolve these problems, Clarke : 321–361, 2012) proposed that individuals are circumscribed by mechanisms that constrain heritable variance in fitness. Simultaneously, Gorelick and Heng : (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Social revolution. [REVIEW]Jonathan Birch - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (4):571-581.
    Andrew Bourke’s Principles of Social Evolution identifies three stages that characterize an evolutionary transition in individuality and deploys inclusive fitness theory to explain each stage. The third stage, social group transformation, has hitherto received relatively little attention from inclusive fitness theorists. In this review, I first discuss Bourke’s “virtual dominance” hypothesis for the evolution of the germ line. I then contrast Bourke’s inclusive fitness approach to the major transitions with the multi-level approach developed by Richard Michod, Samir Okasha and others. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individuality.Pierrick Bourrat - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (1):1-16.
    I extend work from Krakauer et al. (2020), who propose a conception of individuality as the capacity to propagate information through time. From this conception, they develop information-theoretic measures. I identify several shortcomings with these measures—in particular, that they are associative rather than causal. I rectify this shortcoming by deriving a causal information-theoretic measure of individuality. I then illustrate how this measure can be implemented and extended in the context of evolutionary transitions in individuality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Sylvain Charlat, André Ariew, Pierrick Bourrat, María Ferreira Ruiz, Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Sandeep Krishna, Michael Lachmann, Nicolas Lartillot, Louis Le Sergeant D'Hendecourt, Christophe Malaterre, Philippe Nghe, Etienne Rajon, Olivier Rivoire, Matteo Smerlak & Zorana Zeravcic - 2021 - Life 11 (10):1051.
    Natural selection is commonly seen not just as an explanation for adaptive evolution, but as the inevitable consequence of “heritable variation in fitness among individuals”. Although it remains embedded in biological concepts, such a formalisation makes it tempting to explore whether this precondition may be met not only in life as we know it, but also in other physical systems. This would imply that these systems are subject to natural selection and may perhaps be investigated in a biological framework, where (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark