In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified by the Heraclitean metaphor of the stream of life. This alternative conception is explored in its various historical formulations and the extent to which it captures the nature of living systems is examined. Following this, the chapter considers the metaphysical (...) implications of reconceptualizing the organism from complex machine to flowing stream. What do we learn when we reject the mechanical and embrace the processual? Three key lessons for biological ontology are identified. The first is that activity is a necessary condition for existence. The second is that persistence is grounded in the continuous self-maintenance of form. And the third is that order does not entail design. (shrink)

Six keynote papers presented at TSC 2009 — by Susan Greenfield, Wolf Singer, Stuart Hameroff, Jonathan Schooler, Hakwan Lau, and David Chalmers—are reviewed below in order to investigate to what extent social analysis can be usefully applied in different areas of consciousness studies. The six papers did not ostensibly address social aspects of consciousness; nevertheless I hope to show that it is often beneficial to consider the possible social implications in any consciousness- related work.

Josiah Parsons Cooke established chemistry education at Harvard University, initiated an atomic weight research program, and broadly impacted American chemical education through his students, the introduction of laboratory instruction, textbooks, and influence on Harvard's admissions requirements. The devoutly Unitarian Cooke also articulated and defended a biogeochemical natural theology, which he defended by arguing for commonalities between the epistemologies of science and religion. Cooke's pre-Mendeleev classification scheme for the elements and atomic weight research were motivated by his interest in numerical order (...) in nature, which reflected his belief in a divine lawgiver. (shrink)

In the future, human destiny may depend on our ethics. In particular, biotechnology and expansion in space can transform life, raising profound questions. Guidance may be found in Life-centered ethics, as biotic ethics that value the basic patterns of organic gene/protein life, and as panbiotic ethics that always seek to expand life. These life-centered principles can be based on scientific insights into the unique place of life in nature, and the biological unity of all life. Belonging to life then implies (...) a human purpose: to safeguard and propagate life. Expansion in space will advance this purpose but will also raise basic questions. Should we expand all life or only intelligent life? Should we aim to create populations of trillions? Should we seed other solar systems? How far can we change but still preserve the human species, and life itself? The future of all life may be in our hands, and it can depend on our guiding ethics whether life will fulfil its full potentials. Given such profound powers, life-centered ethics can best secure future generations. Our descendants may then understand nature more deeply, and seek to extend life indefinitely. In that future, our human existence can find a cosmic purpose. (shrink)

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 (...) extension of Hull’s view to the ubiquitous phenomenon of symbiosis. Finally, using immunology as a key example, it shows that the genidentity view suggests that the main interest of a process approach is epistemological rather than ontological and that its principal claim is one of priority, namely that processes precede and define things, and not vice versa. (shrink)

The concept of an ecological niche (econiche) has been used in a variety of ways, some of which are incompatible with a relational or functional interpretation of the term. This essay seeks to standardize usage by limiting the concept to functional relations between organisms and their surroundings, and to revise the concept to include epistemic relations. For most organisms, epistemics are a vital aspect of their functional relationships to their surroundings and, hence, a major determinant of their econiche. Rejecting the (...) traditional dualism of organism and environment, an econiche is defined as the reciprocal (dual) of a functionally specified class of organisms (FSTU). From this perspective, an econiche necessarily implies a certain type of organism, and a class of functionally similar organisms implies a special econiche.The econiche concept is also discussed in relation to other ecological terms that reflect the distributional patterns of organisms, such as habitat, and the concept of an empty niche is criticized. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretical challenges, still relevant today, that arose in the first decades of the twentieth century related to the concept of the organism. During this period, new insights into the plasticity and robustness of organisms as well as their complex interactions fueled calls, especially in the UK and in the German-speaking world, for grounding biological theory on the concept of the organism. This new organism-centered biology understood organisms as the most important explanatory and methodological unit in biological investigations. (...) At least three theoretical strands can be distinguished in this movement: Organicism, dialectical materialism, and holistic biology. This paper shows that a major challenge of OCB was to describe the individual organism as a causally autonomous and discrete unit with consistent boundaries and, at the same time, as inextricably interwoven with its environment. In other words, OCB had to conciliate individualistic with anti-individualistic perspectives. This challenge was addressed by developing a concept of life that included functionalist and metabolic elements, as well as biochemical and physical ones. It allowed for specifying organisms as life forms that actively delimit themselves from the environment. Finally, this paper shows that the recent return to the concept of the organism, especially in the so-called “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis,” is challenged by similar anti-individualistic tendencies. However, in contrast to its early-twentieth-century forerunner, today’s organism-centered approaches have not yet offered a solution to this problem. (shrink)

Sewall Wright first encountered the complex systems characteristic of gene combinations while a graduate student at Harvard's Bussey Institute from 1912 to 1915. In Mendelian breeding experiments, Wright observed a hierarchical dependence of the organism's phenotype on dynamic networks of genetic interaction and organization. An animal's physical traits, and thus its autonomy from surrounding environmental constraints, depended greatly on how genes behaved in certain combinations. Wright recognized that while genes are the material determinants of the animal phenotype, operating with great (...) regularity, the special nature of genetic systems contributes to the animal phenotype a degree of spontaneity and novelty, creating unpredictable trait variations by virtue of gene interactions. As a result of his experimentation, as well as his keen interest in the philosophical literature of his day, Wright was inspired to see genetic systems as conscious, living organisms in their own right. Moreover, he decided that since genetic systems maintain ordered stability and cause unpredictable novelty in their organic wholes (the animal phenotype), it would be necessary for biologists to integrate techniques for studying causally ordered phenomena (experimental method) and chance phenomena (correlation method). From 1914 to 1921 Wright developed his "method of path coefficient" (or "path analysis"), a new procedure drawing from both laboratory experimentation and statistical correlation in order to analyze the relative influence of specific genetic interactions on phenotype variation. In this paper I aim to show how Wright's philosophy for understanding complex genetic systems (panpsychic organicism) logically motivated his 1914-1921 design of path analysis. (shrink)

Sewall Wright first encountered the complex systems characteristic of gene combinations while a graduate student at Harvard's Bussey Institute from 1912 to 1915. In Mendelian breeding experiments, Wright observed a hierarchical dependence of the organism's phenotype on dynamic networks of genetic interaction and organization. An animal's physical traits, and thus its autonomy from surrounding environmental constraints, depended greatly on how genes behaved in certain combinations. Wright recognized that while genes are the material determinants of the animal phenotype, operating with great (...) regularity, the special nature of genetic systems contributes to the animal phenotype a degree of spontaneity and novelty, creating unpredictable trait variations by virtue of gene interactions. As a result of his experimentation, as well as his keen interest in the philosophical literature of his day, Wright was inspired to see genetic systems as conscious, living organisms in their own right. Moreover, he decided that since genetic systems maintain ordered stability and cause unpredictable novelty in their organic wholes, it would be necessary for biologists to integrate techniques for studying causally ordered phenomena and chance phenomena. From 1914 to 1921 Wright developed his "method of path coefficient", a new procedure drawing from both laboratory experimentation and statistical correlation in order to analyze the relative influence of specific genetic interactions on phenotype variation. In this paper I aim to show how Wright's philosophy for understanding complex genetic systems logically motivated his 1914-1921 design of path analysis. (shrink)

Recent developments in the natural sciences make a renewed dialogue with the humanities possible. Previously, humanists resisted transferring scientific paradigms into fields like history, fearing materialism and determinism would deprive experience of its meaning and people of their freedom. At the same time, scientists were realizing that deterministic materialism made understanding phenomena like life virtually impossible. Scientists escaped the irony of describing a nature to which they did not belong by also discovering that their knowledge can never be complete and (...) that descriptions of nature at the subatomic level were essentially random. These developments, as Monod said, weakened the “Modern” paradigm sufficiently to make life scientifically possible. To understand how life might actually exist, however, scientists had to move beyond laments about observations losing information and concentrate on how nature creates information. Nature creates information in the process of reducing thermodynamic gradients and stores created information in self-organized systems. Nature thus becomes historical, for it is defined by qualitative changes accumulating over time because of unpredictable contingencies. This paper will explore the possibility that the patterned processes by which nature changes apply in the human realm, where interactions can change people and created information can be stored in self-organized societies. Values, Ethics and Morals are the qualitatively new information stored in social systems. VEMs script the actions structuring societies, demonstrating there is meaning in history and solving the problem of how sequences of events –“chronicles”–become narratives. Moreover, when societies compete, their system-structuring information is tested in the same way natural selection tests DNA. Thus, the succession of social systems suggests there is a meaning of history. The meaning of history need be no more transcendental or intended than Darwinian evolution. But if organs and traits can have biological value without implying design, socially constructed attributes like morality, consciousness, and freedom can be valued without supposing history has an ultimate or eternal purpose. Aspiring to show how the cacophony of historical events becomes a cosmos, a “well-ordered” context in which changes become meaningful, this sketch suggests a new understanding of nature may provide a basis for ethics. (shrink)

The article reevaluates the reception of Mendelism in France, and more generally considers the complex relationship between Mendelism and plant breeding in the first half on the 20th century. It shows on the one side that agricultural research and higher education institutions have played a key role in the development and institutionalization of genetics in France, whereas university biologists remained reluctant to accept this approach on heredity. But on the other side, plant breeders, and agricultural researchers, despite an interest in (...) Mendelism, never came to see it as the breeders' panacea, and regarded it instead as of only limited value for plant breeding. I account for this judgment in showing that the plant breeders and Mendelism designed two contrasting kinds of experimental systems and inhabited distinct experimental cultures. While Mendelian geneticists designed experimental systems that allowed the production of definite ratios of different forms that varied in relation to a few characters, plant breeders' experimental systems produced a wide range of variation, featuring combinations between hundreds of traits. Rather than breaking this multiple variation down into simple elements, breeders designed and monitored a genetic lottery. The gene was a unit in a Mendelian experimental culture, an "epistemic thing" as Rheinberger put it, that could be grasped by means of statistical regularities, but it remained of secondary importance for French plant breeders, for whom the strain or the variety -- not the gene -- was the fundamental unit of analysis and manipulation. (shrink)

Through dialogue new worlds can be imagined. In this imaginary dialogue between the vision of Daedalus, speaking through J. B. S. Haldane, and the Old Testament visionary, Job, the relationship between nature and science is re-explored, re-examined and re-engaged. Their words bounce back off the media's contemporary imagining of the BSE crisis in Britain, an episode that profoundly questioned this nature-science interrelationship.

The recently suggested reformulation of Darwinian evolutionary theory, based on the thermodynamics of self‐organizing processes, has strong philosophical implications. My claim is that the main philosophical merit of the thermodynamic approach, made especially clear in J.S. Wicken's work, is its insistence on the law‐governed, continuous nature of evolution. I attempt to substantiate this claim following a historical analysis of beginning‐of‐the‐century ideas on evolution and matter‐life relationship, in particular, the fitness‐of‐the‐environment‐for‐life theory of the Harvard physiologist L.J. Henderson. In addition, I point (...) to an epistemological common ground underlying the studies of the “thermodynamics school” and other currently active research groups focusing on the emergence and evolution of biological organization. (shrink)

Emerging developments in communications and computing technology may transform the nature of human identity, in the process rendering obsolete the traditional philosophical and scientific frameworks for understanding the nature of individuals and groups. Progress toward an evaluation of this possibility and an appropriate conceptual basis for analyzing it may be derived from two very different but ultimately connected social movements that promote this radical change. One is the governmentally supported exploration of Converging Technologies, based in the unification of nanoscience, biology, (...) information science and cognitive science. The other is the Transhumanist movement, which has been criticized as excessively radical yet is primarily conducted as a dignified intellectual discussion within a new school of philosophy about human enhancement. Together, NBIC and Transhumanism suggest the immense transformative power of today’s technologies, through which individuals may explore multiple identities by means of online avatars, semi-autonomous intelligent agents, and other identity expansions. (shrink)