The subject of (ir)reducibility in biochemistry has resurfaced recently in the literature. Along with it comes a renewed emphasis on the organizational complexity of the living state and, more broadly, concern over the unity of the sciences.

This article discusses the viability of a feminist constructivist approach of knowledge through the careful reading of the work of the feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes an interpretation of objectivity in terms of "situated knowledges. " Both the subject and the object of knowledge are endowed with the status of material-semiotic actors. By blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, Haraway's narratives about scientific discourse become populated with hybrid subjects/objects. The author argues (...) that the ethics of these hybrid subjects consists of an uneasy mixture of a Nietzschean and a socialist-Christian ethic. The article concludes by setting out why Haraway's project constitutes an inter esting effort tofuse postmodern insights and feminist commitments. (shrink)

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...) a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

In biology the term “vitalism” is usually associated with Hans Driesch’s doctrine of the entelechy: entelechies were nonmaterial, bio-specific agents responsible for governing a few peculiar biological phenomena. Since vitalism defined as such violates metaphysical materialism, the received view refutes the doctrine of the entelechy as a metaphysical heresy. But in the early twentieth century, a different, non-metaphysical evaluation of vitalism was endorsed by some biologists and philosophers, which finally led to a logical refutation of the doctrine of the entelechy. (...) In this non-metaphysical evaluation, first, vitalism was not treated as a metaphysical heresy but a legitimate response to the inadequacy of mechanistic explanations in biology. Second, the refutation of vitalism was logically rather than metaphysically supported by contemporary biological knowledge. The entelechy was not a valid concept, because vitalists could neither formulate vital laws, nor offer convincing examples of experimental indeterminism. (shrink)

This article introduces the work of A.N. Whitehead and analyses his relevance to contemporary social theory. It demonstrates how a range of authors have recently utilized the work of Whitehead across a range of topics and holds that there is a need for a general introduction to his work that will open up his ideas and possible impact to a wider readership. White-head’s work is introduced through a discussion of his critique of the philosophical and scientific conceptions of substance and (...) materiality, which led to the establishment of nature as passive, external and distinct from the human or social realm. The article further analyses some of the consequences of this position, such as viewing all data or information about the world as inert. This leads to Whitehead’s argument that the retention of these ‘outdated’ conceptions has contributed to contemporary misconceptions of the status of objects within science, for example – genes. I suggest that Whitehead offers much to social theory especially in terms of re-thinking the natural/social distinction and moving beyond linguistic and discursive production to a theory of genuine construction that can incorporate both materiality and subjectivity. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this essay I will sketch a few instances of how, and a few forms in which, the “invisible” became an epistemic category in the development of the life sciences from the seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to most of the other papers in this issue, I do not so much focus on the visualization of various little entities, and the tools and contexts in which a visual representation of these things was realized. (...) I will be more concerned with the basic problem of introducing entities or structures that cannot be seen, as elements of an explanatory strategy. I will try to review the ways in which the invisibility of such entities moved from the unproblematic status of just being too small to be accessible to the naked or even the armed eye, to the problematic status of being invisible in principle and yet being indispensable within a given explanatory framework. The epistemological concern of the paper is thus to sketch the historical process of how the “unseen” became a problem in the modern life sciences. The coming into being of the invisible as a space full of paradoxes is itself the product of a historical development that still awaits proper reconstruction. (shrink)

Abstract“Development” suggests that there is something that is developing, or changing over time. We can ask about temporal boundaries of that developmental process, asking when development begins or ends and whether it has defined stages along the way, for example. We can ask about spatial boundaries as well: where does the developing object start and end? For this article, I ask about the boundary definition of the developing organism in particular. What is an individual organism, and what defines it as (...) the same organism as it changes over time? In particular, how has this been answered historically: how have researchers described and explained what an individual developing organism is? This article explores ideas and approaches especially starting in the late 19th century, and in particular looks at the role of “organization.”. (shrink)

In his 1987 book "Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb and the Engineering Ideal in Biology", Philip Pauly presented his readers with the biologist Jacques Loeb and his role in developing an emphasis on control of life processes. Loeb's work on artificial parthenogenesis, for example, provided an example of bioengineering at work. This paper revisits Pauly's study of Loeb and explores the way current research in regenerative medicine reflects the same tradition. A history of regeneration research reveals patterns of thinking and research (...) methods that both echo Loeb's ideology and point the way to modern studies. Pauly's work revealed far more than we readers realized at the time of its publication. (shrink)

Metaphors play a crucial role in the understanding of science. Since antiquity, metaphors have been used in technical texts to describe structures unknown or unnamed; besides establishing a terminology of science, metaphors are also important for the expression of concepts. However, a concise terminology to classify metaphors in the language of science has not been established yet. But in the context of studying the history of a science and its concepts, a precise typology of metaphors can be helpful. Metaphors have (...) a lot in common with models in science, as has been observed already. In this paper, therefore, I suggest a typology of metaphor in ancient science to fill this terminological gap by using concepts applied to the classification of models in science, as coined by Rom Harré. I propose to differentiate between homeoconceptual metaphors and paraconceptual metaphors. Furthermore, functional and structural aspects of metaphors in ancient science are taken into account. Case studies from ancient texts displaying metaphors in ancient science are presented and classified following the outlined typology of metaphors. (shrink)

The living forms represented in this paper are sets of parts that spontaneously increase in organization. Their organizations are measured by an information-theoretic function derived from the work of Boltzmann and Shannon. We briefly review its derivation in the context of the troubled role of mathematics in biology, and then define the function. We illustrate its nature by measuring the 22 different organizations of a set of eight things; and we facilitate its use by defining the parameters that determine an (...) amount of organization. The measure is then applied to show that the organization of limb pairs on free-living arthropods, based on data given by Cisne, confirms a pattern of increasing organization in their evolution from the Cambrian era to the present. Further applications measure the changes in organizations of ideal (theoretical) life forms, and contrasting changes in inanimate systems. Our main results represent the reproduction of unicellular organisms, and the formation of hierarchies, as processes of increasing organization. (shrink)

Embryonic development and ontogeny occupy whatis often depicted as the black box betweengenes – the genotype – and the features(structures, functions, behaviors) of organisms– the phenotype; the phenotype is not merelya one-to-one readout of the genotype. Thegenes home, context, and locus of operation isthe cell. Initially, in ontogeny, that cell isthe single-celled zygote. As developmentensues, multicellular assemblages of like cells(modules) progressively organized as germlayers, embryonic fields, anlage,condensations, or blastemata, enable genes toplay their roles in development and evolution.As modules, condensations are (...) fundamentaldevelopmental and selectable units ofmorphology (morphogenetic units) that mediateinteractions between genotype and phenotype viaevolutionary developmental mechanisms. In ahierarchy of emergent processes, gene networksand gene cascades (genetic modules) link thegenotype with morphogenetic units such ascondensations, while epigenetic processes suchas embryonic inductions, tissue interactionsand functional integration, link morphogeneticunits to the phenotype. To support theseconclusions I distinguish units of heredityfrom units of transmission and discussepigenetic inheritance by tracing the historyof relationship between embryology andevolution, especially the role(s) assigned tocells or to cellular components in generatingtheories of morphological change in evolution.The concept of cells as modular morphogeneticunits is modeled and illustrated using themammalian dentary bone. (shrink)

The question of whether the modern evolutionary synthesis requires an extension has recently become a topic of discussion, and a source of controversy. We suggest that this debate is, for the most part, not about the modern synthesis at all. Rather, it is about the extent to which genetic mechanisms can be regarded as the primary determinants of phenotypic characters. The modern synthesis has been associated with the idea that phenotypes are the result of gene products, while supporters of the (...) extended synthesis have suggested that environmental factors, along with processes such as epigenetic inheritance, and niche construction play an important role in character formation. We argue that the methodology of the modern evolutionary synthesis has been enormously successful, but does not provide an accurate characterization of the origin of phenotypes. For its part, the extended synthesis has yet to be transformed into a testable theory, and accordingly, has yielded few results. We conclude by suggesting that the origin of phenotypes can only be understood by integrating findings from all levels of the organismal hierarchy. In most cases, parts and processes from a single level fail to accurately explain the presence of a given phenotypic trait. The debate between the proponents of the modern and extended syntheses is somewhat reminiscent of the duck-rabbit illusion. The two sides are probably talking about the same thing, but from different perspectives. If not, then we argue that the challenge is to do an experiment that rules out the alternative view. (shrink)

It is useful on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ not only to reconsider its lessons in the context of what is frequently described as the re-engineering of ‘life itself’, but to look at Haraway’s earlier work on embryos. In this article I begin with Haraway’s analysis of embryology in the 1970s to suggest her cyborg embryo was already there, and has, if anything, gained relevance in today’s embryo-strewn society. I argue further, as the title suggests, (...) that the cyborg embryo has been crucial in defining our path to what I am calling here, building on Haraway’s notion of trans from Modest_Witness, ‘transbiology’ - broadly meaning stem cell research, cloning, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. To illustrate this argument I draw on recent ethnographic fieldwork in a new stem cell derivation facility in the UK built adjacent to an IVF surgery. Using this example, I explore the important and paradoxical role of IVF in the emergence of stem cell science, cloning and transbiology, suggesting that Haraway’s analysis remains crucial to understanding the ironic and contradictory, and unexpectedly generative, circumstances through which the IVF-stem cell interface - the door to transbiology - came into being. (shrink)

What do houses do to the people who live with them? In what sense are houses themselves living things? If they live and act, how to conceive of the relationship between built and natural landscapes, and between environment and life more broadly? This article considers three moments at which human geographers have attempted to answer these questions without submitting to visions of environmental causation and constraint favoured by determinists, who dominated the discipline into the early 20th century. The article begins (...) with the work of Carl Sauer, by 1925 the major American figure refuting environmental determinism at a theoretical level and recommending the study of housing as an articulate transcript of human action. It then looks back to the American writings of Friedrich Ratzel, one of several German scholars Sauer canonized, to illuminate a more vitalistic ontology of domestic architecture, and an urbanism, untapped by Sauer when filing his dissent. It then looks ahead to mid-century studies of vernacular architecture – by those of Sauer’s students friendlier to urban life than he was, and by the critic and publisher J. B. Jackson – to assess how this inheritance informed critiques of industrial modernity in the post-war United States. The article observes certain continuities, despite manifest tensions, between ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural geographies. It also routes a long-standing set of debates concerning the relationship of materiality to meaning – and of spatial to social form – through the case of human geography, a peculiar interstice in the broader constellation of disciplines. (shrink)

The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles T. Tart. Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality by Logi Gunnarsson. Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena by Hereward Carrington. Can the Mind Survive beyond Death? In Pursuit of Scientific Evidence by Satwant K. Pasricha. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. “Why AI Is a Dangerous Dream,” (...) Opinion, Interview with Noel Sharkey by Nic Fleming. (shrink)

The theoretical movement known under the heading of posthumanism has entered the academic field. Posthumanisms most prominent feature is to retrieve the concept of matter into the analytical framework. Matter is understood to be under-theorized within the social sciences as a result of the permeative focus upon language and discourse. A prevailing understanding of posthumanism that has been used within educational science and philosophy thus consists of moving the searchlight from language/discourse onto matter. Notably, these scholars are turning to the (...) philosopher Karen Barad in order to spell out their posthumanistic implications. The aim of the thesis is to give an account of the philosophy of Karen Barad in contrast to other prevailing renderings of her. The analysis is carried out using a contrastive methodological approach. In this study I demonstrate how my reading of Barad differs from the scholarly readings that I choose to engage with. The results show that with an alternative conceptual understanding of Barad’s posthumanistic theory the analysis is being steered towards the entanglement of matter and discourse rather than towards the materialistic components of a posed problem. In addition, the results also show how a focus on the ontological underpinnings of Barad’s theoretical framework can give crucial contributions when it comes to understanding the generative conditions of science and knowledge-making. (shrink)