The word ‘environment’ has a history. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a singular, abstract entity—the organism—interacting with another singular, abstract entity—the environment—was virtually unknown. In this paper I trace how the idea of a plurality of external conditions or circumstances was replaced by the idea of a singular environment. The central figure behind this shift, at least in Anglo-American intellectual life, was the philosopher Herbert Spencer. I examine Spencer’s work from 1840 to 1855, demonstrating that he was exposed (...) to a variety of discussions of the ‘force of circumstances’ in this period, and was decisively influenced by the ideas of Auguste Comte in the years preceding the publication of Principles of psychology (1855). It is this latter work that popularized the word ‘environment’ and the corresponding idea of organism–environment interaction—an idea with important metaphysical and methodological implications. Spencer introduced into the English-speaking world one of our most enduring dichotomies: organism and environment. (shrink)

In his target article, Koonin discusses the insights into the evolution of bacterial genomes provided by the CRISPR-Cas system. This evolved defense system is based on intrinsic processes of genome engineering which, as he argues, enable Lamarckian inheritance. In this commentary I discuss some historical and conceptual issues that pertain to Koonin’s analysis of this aspect of the CRISPR-Cas system, extending and qualifying his discussion.

According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, religiosity is rooted in feeling (Gefühl). As a result of our engagement with the world, on which we depend and which we can influence, we have both a sense of dependence and of freedom. Schleiermacher speculated that a sense of absolute dependence in reflective beings with self-consciousness (human beings) gave rise to religion. Using insights from contemporary philosophy of biology and cognitive science, I seek to naturalize Schleiermacher's ideas. I moreover show that this naturalization is in (...) line with Schleiermacher's outlook on biology, as he already had evolutionary considerations in mind when he wrote the Christian Faith (1830). While Schleiermacher rejects natural theology in a narrow sense (proofs for the existence of God), his project is natural theological in a broader sense, as it roots religion in experiences that we can examine using naturalistic theories. (shrink)

The Romantic- and Revolution-era French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is an important precursor for Jablonka’s and Ginsburg’s theory of living beings as beings that learn. Lamarck defined living beings as beings that compose and create. Like Jablonka and Ginsburg’s learning theory, Lamarck’s composing and creating theory locates life in the capacity for a kind of purposeful striving. A consideration of his theory can suggest fundamental questions for Jablonka and Ginsburg regarding the relations among what they call “vivaciousness,” the state of living (...) organisms, learning, and evolutionary transformation. (shrink)

Structurally, cognitive and biological evolution are highly similar. Random variation and constant but blind selection drive evolution within biology as well as within cognition. However, evolution of cognitive programs, and in particular of grammar systems, is not a subclass of biological evolution but a domain of its own. The abstract evolutionary principles, however, are akin in cognitive and biological evolution. In other words, insights gained in the biological domain can be cautiously applied to the cognitive domain. This paper claims that (...) the cognitively encapsulated, i.e. consciously inaccessible, aspects of grammars as cognitively represented systems, that is, the procedural and structural parts of grammars, are subject to, and results of, Darwinian evolution, applying to a domain-specific cognitive program. Other, consciously accessible aspects of language do not fall under Darwinian evolutionary principles, but are mostly instances of social changes. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the debate in evolutionary epistemology about the nature of the evolutionary process at work in the development of science: whether it is Darwinian or Lamarckian. It is claimed that if we are to make progress through the many arguments that have grown up around this issue, we must return to an examination of the concepts of change and evolution, and examine the basic kinds of mechanism capable of bringing evolution about. This examination results in two (...) kinds of processes being identified, dubbed direct and indirect, and these are claimed to exhaust all possibilities. These ideas are then applied to a selection of the debates within evolutionary epistemology. It is shown that while arguments about the pattern and rate of evolutionary change are necessarily inconclusive, those concerning the origin of novel variations and the mode of inheritance can be resolved by means of the distinctions made here. It is claimed that the process of selection in the evolution of science can also be clarified. The conclusion is that the main process producing the evolution of science is a direct or Lamarckian one although, if realism is correct, an indirect or Darwinian process plays a vital role. (shrink)

August Weismann proposed that genetic changes in somatic cells cannot pass to germ cells and hence to next generations. Nevertheless, evidence is accumulating that some environmental effects can promote heritable changes in the DNA of germ cells, which implies that some somatic influence on germ line is possible. This influence is mostly detrimental and related to the presence of oxidative stress, which induces mutations and epigenetic changes. This effect should be stronger in males due to the particular characteristics of sperm. (...) Here, we propose the hypothesis that females are able to avoid males with oxidatively damaged DNA in the germ line by using oxidative‐dependent (pre‐ and post‐mating) signals. This new hypothesis may shed light on unsolved questions in evolutionary biology, such as the benefits of polyandry, the lek paradox, or the role of sexual selection on the evolution of aging. BioEssays 30:1212–1219, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term “palætiological” have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he (...) enumerated in 1847: the solar system, the Earth, its vegetable and animal creation, and man. For wide and various as their subjects are, it will be found that [the palætiological sciences] have all certain principles, maxims, and rules of procedure in common; and thus may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. William Whewell ( 1847, 1, p. 640). (shrink)

This paper analyzes the remarkable popularity of William Paley’s argument from design among contemporary naturalists in biology and the philosophy of science. In philosophy of science Elliott Sober has argued that creationism should be excluded from the schools not because it is not science but because it is ‘less likely’ than evolution according to fairly standard confirmation theory. Creationism is said to have been a plausible scientific option as presented by Paley but no longer to be acceptable according to the (...) same standards that once approved it. In biology C. G. Williams and Richard Dawkins have seen in Paley a proto-adaptationist. This paper shows that the historical assumptions of Sober’s arguments are wrong and that the philosophical arguments themselves take alternatives to science to be alternatives in science and conflate the null hypothesis, chance, with a competing explanatory hypothesis. It is also shown that the similarity of Paley’s adaptationism to that of contemporary biology is not what it is made out to be. (shrink)

Naive physics beliefs can be systematically mistaken. They provide a useful test-bed because they are common, and also because their existence must rely on some adaptive advantage, within a given context. In the second part of the commentary we also ask questions about when a whole family of misbeliefs should be considered together as a single phenomenon.

We propose another positive illusion – overconfidence in the generalisability of one's theory – that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.

La crítica kantiana legó una doble herencia a la biología decimonónica: su noción de ciencia basada en el mecanicismo newtoniano configuró epistemológicamente la teoría de la evolución darwinista, mientras que su comprensión de los organismos se tradujo en una morfología teleológica. En este artículo planteamos dos cuestiones en torno la relación entre las ideas de Kant y Darwin: 1) si Kant habría considerado a Darwin el Newton de la biología, a lo que, con matices, respondemos afirmativamente; 2) si la física (...) newtoniana es hoy suficiente para naturalizar lo orgánico. Nuestra respuesta negativa se fundamenta en las ciencias de la autoorganización y la evo-devo, que permiten plantear la naturalización de la concepción kantiana de los organismos. (shrink)

Nothing in McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) target article deals with the issue of how the adaptivity, or some other aspect, of beliefs might become a biological adaptation; which is to say, how the functions discussed might be coded in such a way in the brain that their development was also coded in gametes or sex transmission cells.

The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...) provide a more solid footing for philosophical anthropological discussions of uniquely human behavior. In particular, I have argued that art, religion and science, which are usually seen as achievements that are quite remote from ordinary modes of reasoning, are subserved by evolved cognitive processes that serve functions in everyday cognitive tasks, that arise early and spontaneously in cognitive development, that are shared cross-culturally, and that have evolved in response to selective pressures in our ancestral past. These mundane cognitive processes provide a measuring rod with which we can assess a diversity of cultural phenomena; they form a unified explanatory framework to approach human culture. I have argued that we can explain uncommon thoughts in terms of interactions between common minds. This dissertation is subdivided into four parts. Part I outlines the problem of human uniqueness, examining theories on how humans conceptualize the world, and what their mental tool box looks like. Part II discusses the evolutionary and cognitive origins of human artistic behavior. Part III focuses on the cognitive science of religion, especially on how it can be applied to the reasoning of theologians and philosophers of religion. Part IV considers the cognitive basis of scientific practice. (shrink)

The longstanding species problem in biology has a history that suggests a solution, and that history is not the received history found in many texts written by biologists or philosophers. The notion of species as the division into subordinate groups of any generic predicate was the staple of logic from Aristotle through the middle ages until quite recently. However, the biological species concept during the same period was at first subtly and then overtly different. Unlike the logic sense, which relied (...) on definitions of the essence of both genus and species, biological species from the time of Epicurus were consistently considered to involve a reproductive element: in short, living species relied not on essential definitions, but on the generative cause, which might not be definable. I term this the generative conception of species: species were the generation by reproduction of form. This undercuts the claim that species before Darwin were essentialist, and divorces the notion of a type from that of essence. In fact, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, logicians explicitly treated biological “species” as a homonym only of logical essentialist species, and permitted considerable deviation from the type or form. At every point, species in logic were thought to be a subset, in effect, of some more general notion. I sketch a history of both philosophical and biological traditions of the species concept, before turning to the current conceptions. These are reconsidered in the light of this history, and in particular Mayr’s changing views are shown to be somewhat Whiggish, historiographically. Of the many touted biological species concepts, only one of which (Mayr’s) is called _the_ Biological Species Concept, none appears to capture all the relevant facts, intuitions, and operational requirements of biology. Cladistic conceptions, however, have much in common with the older philosophical literature, in that the natural group of cladism is the clade, or monophyletic group. After considering the Individuality Thesis, and the metaphysics of species, we see that species are the most particular terminal taxa in a clade, and that they are “defined” in terms of the particular synapomorphies, or evolved characters, that are causally responsible for keeping the lineages that organisms form distinct from one another. In this way, we can remain within the generative conception of species that has been in play for over two millennia, and yet avoid the pitfalls of prior attempts to find a universal conception of species. (shrink)

In a critical review of late twentieth-century gene-culture co-evolutionary models labelled as ‘global phylogeny’, the authors present evidence for the long legacy of co-evolutionary theories in European-based thinking, highlighting that (1) ideas of social and cultural evolution preceded the idea of biological evolution, (2) linguistics played a dominant role in the formation of a unified theory of human co-evolution, and (3) that co-evolutionary thinking was only possible due to perpetuated and renewed transdisciplinary reticulations between scholars of different disciplines—especially within the (...) integrative framework of the ‘humanid’ and the ‘hominid’ branches of anthropology. (shrink)

In Expériences sur le principe de la vie (Chez D’Hautel, Paris, 1812), Jean César Legallois, a French physician and physiologist, explored the basic regulatory framework of vital processes of warm-blooded animals. He decapitated rabbits and cut off their limbs in order to search for a seat of life that is located in the spinal cord. Through ligatures and artificial pulmonary insufflations, he kept the trunks of rabbits alive for some minutes. Legallois thus criticized models of organic order in which the (...) spinal cord only mediates, like a gross nerve, between the brain and the body. He identified a certain section of the spinal cord that influences respiratory acts, and he also established a connection between the spinal cord and the movement of the heart. Further on, Legallois envisioned experiments that would extend the life-time of headless trunks through the infusion of arterial blood. (shrink)