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  1. Development of Cultural Consciousness: From the Perspective of a Social Constructivist.Gregory M. Nixon - 2015 - International Journal of Education and Social Science 2 (10):119-136.
    In this condensed survey, I look to recent perspectives on evolution suggesting that cultural change likely alters the genome. Since theories of development are nested within assumptions about evolution (evo-devo), I next review some oft-cited developmental theories and other psychological theories of the 20th century to see if any match the emerging perspectives in evolutionary theory. I seek theories based neither in nature (genetics) nor nurture (the environment) but in the creative play of human communication responding to necessity. This survey (...)
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  • Metaphors as surrogate variables. The case of adaptive radiation.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos & Mark E. Olson - manuscript
    We develop a new metaphor account where metaphors become surrogate variables for different but related phenomena. As we will argue, subrogation is the result of the interplay between the things inspired by the metaphor and the empirical dynamics that result from such inspiration. In particular, we focus on adaptive radiation, a major concept of evolutionary biology. Our study suggests that there is no distinct phenomenon, process, or pattern in nature than can be identified as adaptive radiation. What we have instead (...)
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  • Ecosystem Complexity Through the Lens of Logical Depth: Capturing Ecosystem Individuality.Cédric Gaucherel - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (4):440-451.
    In this article, I will discuss possible differences between ecosystems and organisms on the basis of their intrinsic complexity. As the concept of complexity still remains highly debated, I propose here a practical and original way to measure the complexity of an ecosystem or an organism. For this purpose, I suggest using the concept of logical depth (LD) in a specific manner, in order to take into account the difficulty as well as the time needed to generate the studied object. (...)
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  • Adaptation, Conflicting Information, and Stress.Minus van Baalen - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (4):431-439.
    Information plays an important role not only in evolution—genetics can be seen as a mechanism to transfer information from one generation to the next—but also in ecology: virtually all organisms use information about their environment to adjust their behavior and life histories. Indeed, being adapted to something can be defined as having the right information to solve the life-history problems that this creates. It then becomes irrelevant precisely where this information came from (genetics, experience, culture, etc.) but rather becomes an (...)
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  • The Heuristic of Form: Mitochondrial Morphology and the Explanation of Oxidative Phosphorylation.Karl S. Matlin - 2016 - Journal of the History of Biology 49 (1):37-94.
    In the 1950s and 1960s, the search for the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation by biochemists paralleled the description of mitochondrial form by George Palade and Fritiof Sjöstrand using electron microscopy. This paper explores the extent to which biochemists studying oxidative phosphorylation took mitochondrial form into account in the formulation of hypotheses, design of experiments, and interpretation of results. By examining experimental approaches employed by the biochemists studying oxidative phosphorylation, and their interactions with Palade, I suggest that use of mitochondrial form (...)
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  • Three Kinds of Constructionism: The Role of Metaphor in the Debate over Niche Constructionism.Emanuele Archetti - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (2):103-115.
    Throughout the years a lively debate has flourished around niche construction theory. A source of contention has been the distinction between narrow and broad construction activities proposed by critics. Narrow construction is limited to the production of evolutionarily advantageous artifacts while broad construction refers to construction activities that have an impact on the ecosystem but offer little or negative adaptive feedback to the organisms. The first has been acknowledged as relevant to evolutionary studies in that it increases species’ fitness and (...)
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  • Sketch for a Theory of Evolution Based on Coding.Joachim De Beule - 2014 - Biosemiotics 7 (2):181-201.
    At the heart of evolutionary theory lays the notion of replication. Unfortunately, this notion is far less exact than the weight of its importance. In this paper, it is argued that replication always involves coding. Furthermore, when a theory of evolution is built on replication based on coding, a unifying and coherent picture arises that sheds new light on some of the controversies and open questions in contemporary biology, such as what are the roles of phylogeny and ontogeny in evolution, (...)
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  • Fundamental Dimensions of Environmental Risk.Bruce J. Ellis, Aurelio José Figueredo, Barbara H. Brumbach & Gabriel L. Schlomer - 2009 - Human Nature 20 (2):204-268.
    The current paper synthesizes theory and data from the field of life history (LH) evolution to advance a new developmental theory of variation in human LH strategies. The theory posits that clusters of correlated LH traits (e.g., timing of puberty, age at sexual debut and first birth, parental investment strategies) lie on a slow-to-fast continuum; that harshness (externally caused levels of morbidity-mortality) and unpredictability (spatial-temporal variation in harshness) are the most fundamental environmental influences on the evolution and development of LH (...)
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  • Explaining the Gap: On Humans and Other Animals – Essay Review: Thomas Suddendorf: The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals. [REVIEW]Oren Harman - 2013 - Journal of the History of Biology 46 (4):739-755.
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  • Evolution in Biological and Non-biological Systems: The Origins of Life.Isaac Salazar-Ciudad - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (1):26-37.
    A replicator is simply something that makes copies of itself. There are hypothetical replicators (e.g., self-catalyzing chemical cycles) that are suspected to be unable to exhibit heritable variation. Variation in any of their constituent molecules would not lead them to produce offspring with those new variant molecules. Copying, such as in DNA replication or in xerox machines, allows any sequence to be remade and then sequence variations to be inherited. This distinction has been used against non-RNA-world hypotheses: without RNA replication (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Overextension: the extended mind and arguments from evolutionary biology. [REVIEW]Armin W. Schulz - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2):241-255.
    I critically assess two widely cited evolutionary biological arguments for two versions of the ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT): namely, an argument appealing to Dawkins’s ‘Extended Phenotype Thesis’ (EPT) and an argument appealing to ‘Developmental Systems Theory’ (DST). Specifically, I argue that, firstly, appealing to the EPT is not useful for supporting the EMT (in either version), as it is structured and motivated too differently from the latter to be able to corroborate or elucidate it. Secondly, I extend and defend Rupert’s (...)
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  • Learning Plants: Semiosis Between the Parts and the Whole. [REVIEW]Ramsey Affifi - 2013 - Biosemiotics 6 (3):547-559.
    In this article, I explore plant semiosis with a focus on plant learning. I distinguish between the scales and levels of learning conceivable in phytosemiosis, and identify organism-scale learning as the distinguishing question for plant semiosis. Since organism-scale learning depends on organism-scale semiosis, I critically review the arguments regarding whole-plant functional cycles. I conclude that they have largely relied on Uexküllian biases that have prevented an adequate interpretation of modern plant neurobiology. Through an examination of trophic growth in plant roots, (...)
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  • Darwinism Extended: A Survey of How the Idea of Cultural Evolution Evolved.Chris Buskes - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (3):661-691.
    In the past 150 years there have been many attempts to draw parallels between cultural and biological evolution. Most of these attempts were flawed due to lack of knowledge and false ideas about evolution. In recent decades these shortcomings have been cleared away, thus triggering a renewed interest in the subject. This paper offers a critical survey of the main issues and arguments in that discussion. The paper starts with an explication of the Darwinian algorithm of evolution. It is argued (...)
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  • Murder on the development express: who killed nature/nurture?: Evelyn Fox Keller: The mirage of a space between nature and nurture. Duke University Press, 2010.Karola Stotz - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (6):919-929.
    Keller explains the persistence of the nature/nurture debate by a chronic ambiguity in language derived from classical and behavioral genetics. She suggests that the more precise vocabulary of modern molecular genetics may be used to rephrase the underlying questions and hence provide a way out of this controversy. I show that her proposal fits into a long tradition in which other authors have wrestled with the same problem and come to similar conclusions. - Review of 'The mirage of a space (...)
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  • More on how and why: cause and effect in biology revisited.Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt & Tobias Uller - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):719-745.
    In 1961, Ernst Mayr published a highly influential article on the nature of causation in biology, in which he distinguished between proximate and ultimate causes. Mayr argued that proximate causes (e.g. physiological factors) and ultimate causes (e.g. natural selection) addressed distinct ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and were not competing alternatives. That distinction retains explanatory value today. However, the adoption of Mayr’s heuristic led to the widespread belief that ontogenetic processes are irrelevant to evolutionary questions, a belief that has (1) hindered (...)
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  • Selection without replicators: the origin of genes, and the replicator/interactor distinction in etiobiology.John S. Wilkins, Ian Musgrave & Clem Stanyon - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (2):215-239.
    Genes are thought to have evolved from long-lived and multiply-interactive molecules in the early stages of the origins of life. However, at that stage there were no replicators, and the distinction between interactors and replicators did not yet apply. Nevertheless, the process of evolution that proceeded from initial autocatalytic hypercycles to full organisms was a Darwinian process of selection of favourable variants. We distinguish therefore between Neo-Darwinian evolution and the related Weismannian and Central Dogma divisions, on the one hand, and (...)
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  • Genetic Representation Explains the Cluster of Innateness‐Related Properties.Nicholas Shea - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):466-493.
    The concept of innateness is used to make inferences between various better-understood properties, like developmental canalization, evolutionary adaptation, heritability, species-typicality, and so on (‘innateness-related properties’). This article uses a recently-developed account of the representational content carried by inheritance systems like the genome to explain why innateness-related properties cluster together, especially in non-human organisms. Although inferences between innateness-related properties are deductively invalid, and lead to false conclusions in many actual cases, where some aspect of a phenotypic trait develops in reliance on (...)
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  • Spatio-Cultural Evolution as Information Dynamics—Part II.Zeev Posner - 2012 - Foundations of Science 17 (2):163-203.
    A model of a spatio-cultural sub-context (enfolded in a wider scope context) is presented in the form of a blue print of a Complex System with a two-stage decision engine at its core. The engine first attaches a meaning to analyzable datum, and then decides whether to keep or change it. It does not alter already stored meanings but is designed to search for data to be converted into additional stored meanings and improve the accuracy of correspondence of their spatial (...)
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  • What is Analytic Metaphysics For?James Maclaurin & Heather Dyke - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2):291-306.
    We divide analytic metaphysics into naturalistic and non-naturalistic metaphysics. The latter we define as any philosophical theory that makes some ontological (as opposed to conceptual) claim, where that ontological claim has no observable consequences. We discuss further features of non-naturalistic metaphysics, including its methodology of appealing to intuition, and we explain the way in which we take it to be discontinuous with science. We outline and criticize Ladyman and Ross's 2007 epistemic argument against non-naturalistic metaphysics. We then present our own (...)
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  • Debates in Philosophy of Biology: One Long Argument, or Many?Catherine Kendig - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (1):73 - 81.
    Philosophy of biology, perhaps more than any other philosophy of science, is a discipline in flux. What counts as consensus and key arguments in certain areas changes rapidly.The publication of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology (2010 Wiley-Blackwell) is reviewed and is used as a catalyst to a discussion of the recent expansion of subjects and perspectives in the philosophy of biology as well as their diverse epistemological and methodological commitments.
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  • Why Machine-Information Metaphors are Bad for Science and Science Education.Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry - 2011 - Science & Education 20 (5-6):471.
    Genes are often described by biologists using metaphors derived from computa- tional science: they are thought of as carriers of information, as being the equivalent of ‘‘blueprints’’ for the construction of organisms. Likewise, cells are often characterized as ‘‘factories’’ and organisms themselves become analogous to machines. Accordingly, when the human genome project was initially announced, the promise was that we would soon know how a human being is made, just as we know how to make airplanes and buildings. Impor- tantly, (...)
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  • An alternative to working on machine consciousness.Aaron Sloman - 2010 - International Journal of Machine Consciousness 2 (1):1-18.
    This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements (...)
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  • Cognitive Ecology.Edwin Hutchins - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (4):705-715.
    Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena in context. In particular, it points to the web of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem. At least three fields were taking a deeply ecological approach to cognition 30 years ago: Gibson’s ecological psychology, Bateson’s ecology of mind, and Soviet cultural-historical activity theory. The ideas developed in those projects have now found a place in modern views of embodied, situated, distributed cognition. As cognitive theory continues to shift from units (...)
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  • Universal grammar and the Baldwin effect: a hypothesis and some philosophical consequences.Shane Nicholas Glackin - 2011 - Biology and Philosophy 26 (2):201-222.
    Grammar is now widely regarded as a substantially biological phenomenon, yet the problem of language evolution remains a matter of controversy among Linguists, Cognitive Scientists, and Evolutionary Theorists alike. In this paper, I present a new theoretical argument for one particular hypothesis—that a Language Acquisition Device of the sort first posited by Noam Chomsky might have evolved via the so-called Baldwin Effect . Close attention to the workings of that mechanism, I argue, helps to explain a previously mysterious feature of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Beyond Darwinism’s Eclipse: Functional Evolution, Biochemical Recapitulation and Spencerian Emergence in the 1920s and 1930s. [REVIEW]Rony Armon - 2010 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 41 (1):173 - 194.
    During the 1920s and 1930s, many biologists questioned the viability of Darwin’s theory as a mechanism of evolutionary change. In the early 1940s, and only after a number of alternatives were suggested, Darwinists succeeded to establish natural selection and gene mutation as the main evolutionary mechanisms. While that move, today known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is taken as signalling a triumph of evolutionary theory, certain critical problems in evolution—in particular the evolution of animal function—could not be addressed with this approach. (...)
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  • Developmental Systems Theory Formulated as a Claim about Inherited Representations.Nicholas Shea - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (1):60-82.
    Developmental Systems Theory (DST) emphasises the importance of non-genetic factors in development and their relevance to evolution. A common, deflationary reaction is that it has long been appreciated that non-genetic factors are causally indispensable. This paper argues that DST can be reformulated to make a more substantive claim: that the special role played by genes is also played by some (but not all) non-genetic resources. That special role is to transmit inherited representations, in the sense of Shea (2007: Biology and (...)
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  • Symbiosis, lateral function transfer and the (many) saplings of life.Frédéric Bouchard - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (4):623-641.
    One of intuitions driving the acceptance of a neat structured tree of life is the assumption that organisms and the lineages they form have somewhat stable spatial and temporal boundaries. The phenomenon of symbiosis shows us that such ‘fixist’ assumptions does not correspond to how the natural world actually works. The implications of lateral gene transfer (LGT) have been discussed elsewhere; I wish to stress a related point. I will focus on lateral function transfer (LFT) and will argue, using examples (...)
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  • What philosophy of biology should be: Rosenberg, McShea: Philosophy of biology. A contemporary introduction. Routledge, 2008.Thomas Pradeu - 2011 - Biology and Philosophy 26 (1):119-127.
    This paper reviews Rosenberg’s and McShea’s textbook in philosophy of biology, entitled Philosophy of Biology. A Contemporary Introduction. I insist on the excellent quality of this textbook, then I turn to more critical comments, which deal mainly with what philosophy of biology is, and what it should be.
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  • What, if anything, is an evolutionary novelty?Massimo Pigliucci - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (5):887-898.
    The idea of phenotypic novelty appears throughout the evolutionary literature. Novelties have been defined so broadly as to make the term meaningless and so narrowly as to apply only to a limited number of spectacular structures. Here I examine some of the available definitions of phenotypic novelty and argue that the modern synthesis is ill equipped at explaining novelties. I then discuss three frameworks that may help biologists get a better insight of how novelties arise during evolution but warn that (...)
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  • Towards a unified science of cultural evolution.Alex Mesoudi, Andrew Whiten & Kevin N. Laland - 2006 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4):329-347.
    We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with (...)
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  • The generational cycle of state spaces and adequate genetical representation.Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Richard C. Lewontin & and Marcus W. Feldman - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (2):140-156.
    Most models of generational succession in sexually reproducing populations necessarily move back and forth between genic and genotypic spaces. We show that transitions between and within these spaces are usually hidden by unstated assumptions about processes in these spaces. We also examine a widely endorsed claim regarding the mathematical equivalence of kin-, group-, individual-, and allelic-selection models made by Lee Dugatkin and Kern Reeve. We show that the claimed mathematical equivalence of the models does not hold. *Received January 2007; revised (...)
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  • On organism: Environment buffers and their ecological significance.José-Leonel Torres & Lynn Trainor - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (3):403-416.
    We consider, from a physical perspective, the case where the interface between an organism and its environment becomes large enough that it acts as a buffer regulating their matter and energy exchanges. We illustrate the physiological and evolutionary role of buffers through the example of lungfish estivation. Then we ponder the relevance of buffers of this kind to the quest for a general definition of concepts like niche construction, the extended phenotype, and related ones, whose meaning is conveyed at present (...)
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  • Representation in the genome and in other inheritance systems.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (3):313-331.
    There is ongoing controversy as to whether the genome is a representing system. Although it is widely recognised that DNA carries information, both correlating with and coding for various outcomes, neither of these implies that the genome has semantic properties like correctness or satisfaction conditions, In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Sciences, Vol. II. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 387–400). Here a modified version of teleosemantics is applied to the genome to show that it does indeed have semantic (...)
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  • Realization: Metaphysics, mind, and science.Robert A. Wilson - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (5):985-996.
    This paper surveys some recent work on realization in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.
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  • Shopping for Meaning: Tracing the Ontologies of Food Consumption in Latvia.Anne Sauka - 2022 - Letonica 44 (1):169-190.
    Researchers of different calibres from phenomenology to posthumanism and beyond have outlined the processuality of the body and the environment (Alaimo 2010; Gendlin 2017), stressing the importance of changing the ontological presuppositions of the body-environment bond (Schoeller and Duanetz 2018: 131), since the existing models facilitate the alienation and intangibility of the environment, thus, leading to reduced societal awareness of the importance of environmental issues (Neimanis, Åsberg, Hedrén 2015: 73–74). In this article, I argue that in questions relating to food, (...)
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  • An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems.Amanda Corris - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-21.
    Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecological niche. These interactions continuously shape both systems in a reciprocal manner, resulting in the emergence of reliably co-occurring configurations within and between both systems. The enactive approach to cognition describes this relationship as the structural coupling between an organism and its environment; similarly, Developmental Systems Theory emphasizes the reciprocal (...)
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  • Digging the channels of inheritance: On How to Distinguish Between Cultural and Biological Inheritance.Maria Kronfeldner - 2021 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376.
    Theories of cultural evolution rest on the assumption that cultural inheritance is distinct from biological inheritance. Cultural and biological inheritance are two separate so-called channels of inheritance, two sub-systems of the sum total of developmental resources traveling in distinct ways between individual agents. This paper asks: what justifies this assumption? In reply, a philosophical account is offered that points at three related but distinct criteria that (taken together) make the distinction between cultural and biological inheritance not only precise but also (...)
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  • Non-genetic inheritance: Evolution above the organismal level.Anton Sukhoverkhov & Nathalie Gontier - 2021 - Biosystems 1 (200):104325.
    The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...)
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  • Sources of evolutionary contingency: chance variation and genetic drift.T. Y. William Wong - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (4):1-33.
    Contingency-theorists have gestured to a series of phenomena such as random mutations or rare Armageddon-like events as that which accounts for evolutionary contingency. These phenomena constitute a class, which may be aptly called the ‘sources of contingency’. In this paper, I offer a probabilistic conception of what it is to be a source of contingency and then examine two major candidates: chance variation and genetic drift, both of which have historically been taken to be ‘chancy’ in a number of different (...)
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  • Genidentity and Biological Processes.Thomas Pradeu - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an (...)
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  • The Future of Education: Genetic Enhancement and Metahumanities.Stefan Lorenz Sorgner - 2015 - Journal of Evolution and Technology 25 (1):31-48.
    Habermas has criticized the position that educational and genetic enhancements are parallel events. I; on the other hand; will provide reasons for the position that there is a structural analogy between educational and genetic enhancement such that the moral evaluation of these two procedures should be seen as analogous; too. I will show that an affirmation of educational enhancement suggests an affirmation of genetic enhancement. In addition; I offer reasons why both types of enhancement ought to be affirmed. I will (...)
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  • The Modern Synthesis.Anya Plutynski - 2006 - In Sahotra Sarkar & Jessica Pfeiffer (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Science.
    Huxley coined the phrase, the “evolutionary synthesis” to refer to the acceptance by a vast majority of biologists in the mid-20th Century of a “synthetic” view of evolution. According to this view, natural selection acting on minor hereditary variation was the primary cause of both adaptive change within populations and major changes, such as speciation and the evolution of higher taxa, such as families and genera. This was, roughly, a synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory; it was a (...)
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  • Epigenetic lacunae: Response to Meloni’s Political Biology.Melinda Bonnie Fagan - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (1):109-115.
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  • Social Epigenetics and Equality of Opportunity.Michele Loi, Lorenzo Del Savio & Elia Stupka - 2013 - Public Health Ethics 6 (2):142-153.
    Recent epidemiological reports of associations between socioeconomic status and epigenetic markers that predict vulnerability to diseases are bringing to light substantial biological effects of social inequalities. Here, we start the discussion of the moral consequences of these findings. We firstly highlight their explanatory importance in the context of the research program on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and the social determinants of health. In the second section, we review some theories of the moral status of health inequalities. (...)
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  • A biosemiotic conversation.Howard H. Pattee & Kalevi Kull - 2009 - Sign Systems Studies 37 (1-2):311-330.
    In this dialogue, we discuss the contrast between inexorable physical laws and the semiotic freedom of life. We agree that material and symbolic structures require complementary descriptions, as do the many hierarchical levels of their organizations. We try to clarify our concepts of laws, constraints, rules, symbols, memory, interpreters, and semiotic control. We briefly describe our different personal backgrounds that led us to a biosemiotic approach, and we speculate on the future directions of biosemiotics.
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  • (1 other version)Beyond Darwinism’s Eclipse: Functional Evolution, Biochemical Recapitulation and Spencerian Emergence in the 1920s and 1930s.Rony Armon - 2010 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 41 (1):173-194.
    During the 1920s and 1930s, many biologists questioned the viability of Darwin’s theory as a mechanism of evolutionary change. In the early 1940s, and only after a number of alternatives were suggested, Darwinists succeeded to establish natural selection and gene mutation as the main evolutionary mechanisms. While that move, today known as the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is taken as signalling a triumph of evolutionary theory, certain critical problems in evolution—in particular the evolution of animal function—could not be addressed with this approach. (...)
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  • Niche construction theory as an explanatory framework for human phenomena.Efraim Wallach - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8).
    Niche Construction Theory has been gaining acceptance as an explanatory framework for processes in biological and human evolution. Human cultural niche construction, in particular, is suggested as a basis for understanding many phenomena that involve human genetic and cultural evolution. Herein I assess the ability of the cultural niche construction framework to meet this explanatory role by looking into several NCT-inspired accounts that have been offered for two important episodes of human evolution, and by examining the contribution of NCT to (...)
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  • Maturationally Natural Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science, and the Theory-Ladenness of Perception.Robert N. McCauley - 2015 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (1):183-199.
    Theory-ladenness of perception and cognition is pervasive and variable. Emerging maturationally natural perception and cognition, which are on-line, fast, automatic, unconscious, and, by virtue of their selectivity, theoretical in import, if not in form, define normal development. They contrast with off-line, slow, deliberate, conscious perceptual and cognitive judgments that reflective theories, including scientific ones, inform. Although culture tunes MN systems, their emergence and operation do not rely on culturally distinctive inputs. The sciences advance radically counter-intuitive representations that depart drastically from (...)
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  • Physical basis for the emergence of autopoiesis, cognition and knowledge.W. P. Hall - 2011 - Kororoit Institute Working Papers (2):1-63.
    Paper type: Conceptual perspective. Background(s): Physics, biology, epistemology Perspectives: Theory of autopoietic systems, Popperian evolutionary epistemology and the biology of cognition. Context: This paper is a contribution to developing the theories of hierarchically complex living systems and the natures of knowledge in such systems. Problem: Dissonance between the literatures of knowledge management and organization theory and my observations of the living organization led to consideration of foundation questions: What does it mean to be alive? What is knowledge? How are life (...)
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