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  1. 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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  • Innateness.Steven Gross & Georges Rey - 2012 - In Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.
    A survey of innateness in cognitive science, focusing on (1) what innateness might be, and (2) whether concepts might be innate.
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  • Consumers Need Information: supplementing teleosemantics with an input condition.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2):404-435.
    The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...)
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  • Understanding culture: a commentary on Richerson and Boyd’s Not By Genes Alone.Matteo Mameli - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (2):269-281.
    (2) There is significant cultural variation in the way people reason, categorize, and react to various aspects of the world. A proper understanding of such variation has implications for theories about human nature – and cognitive architecture – and its malleability. In turn, these theories have implications for theories about the status and generalisability of psychological explanations (see Nisbett 2003), for theories about the extent to which social engineering and social reform is possible (see Singer 2000), etc.
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  • The Nest’s Tale. A reply to Richard Dawkins.Patrick Bateson - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (4):553-558.
    If temperature does not vary from one generation from to the next but its value is crucial for the development of particular phenotypic characteristics, a long-term change in its value may trigger major evolutionary changes of the organism. If a bird's nest maintains the critical temperature, then a statement that the bird is the nest's way of making another nest is as helpful as accounts couched in terms of genes' intentions. However, the language of intentions rests on different evidence and (...)
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  • Innateness and the sciences.Matteo Mameli & Patrick Bateson - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (2):155-188.
    The concept of innateness is a part of folk wisdom but is also used by biologists and cognitive scientists. This concept has a legitimate role to play in science only if the colloquial usage relates to a coherent body of evidence. We examine many different candidates for the post of scientific successor of the folk concept of innateness. We argue that none of these candidates is entirely satisfactory. Some of the candidates are more interesting and useful than others, but the (...)
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  • Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions.Andrew Buskell - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (3):284-303.
    Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late-appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity and (b) to highlight the epistemic implications of taking complex hominin technologies as paradigmatic instances of cumulative culture. Addressing these issues both (...)
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  • (1 other version)Cognition as a Social Skill.Sally Haslanger - 2019 - Tandf: Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (1):5-25.
    Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so (...)
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  • An evolutionary metaphysics of human enhancement technologies.Valentin Cheshko - manuscript
    The monograph is an English, expanded and revised version of the book Cheshko, V. T., Ivanitskaya, L.V., & Glazko, V.I. (2018). Anthropocene. Philosophy of Biotechnology. Moscow, Course. The manuscript was completed by me on November 15, 2019. It is a study devoted to the development of the concept of a stable evolutionary human strategy as a unique phenomenon of global evolution. The name “An Evolutionary Metaphysics (Cheshko, 2012; Glazko et al., 2016). With equal rights, this study could be entitled “Biotechnology (...)
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  • Conserving Functions across Generations: Heredity in Light of Biological Organization.Matteo Mossio & Gaëlle Pontarotti - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (1):249-278.
    We develop a conceptual framework that connects biological heredity and organization. We refer to heredity as the cross-generation conservation of functional elements, defined as constraints subject to organizational closure. While hereditary objects are functional constituents of biological systems, any other entity that is stable across generations—and possibly involved in the recurrence of phenotypes—belongs to their environment. The central outcome of the organizational perspective consists in extending the scope of heredity beyond the genetic domain without merging it with the broad category (...)
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  • Conceived this way: innateness defended.Northcott Robert - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    We propose a novel account of the distinction between innate and acquired biological traits: biological traits are innate to the degree that they are caused by factors intrinsic to the organism at the time of its origin; they are acquired to the degree that they are caused by factors extrinsic to the organism. This account borrows from recent work on causation in order to make rigorous the notion of quantitative contributions to traits by different factors in development. We avoid the (...)
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  • COEVOLUTIONARY SEMANTICS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION GENESIS AND EVOLUTIONARY RISK (BETWEEN THE BIOAESTHETICS AND BIOPOLITICS).V. T. Cheshko & O. N. Kuz - 2016 - Anthropological Dimensions of Philosophical Studies (10):43-55.
    Purpose (metatask) of the present work is to attempt to give a glance at the problem of existential and anthropo- logical risk caused by the contemporary man-made civilization from the perspective of comparison and confronta- tion of aesthetics, the substrate of which is emotional and metaphorical interpretation of individual subjective values and politics feeding by objectively rational interests of social groups. In both cases there is some semantic gap pre- sent between the represented social reality and its representation in perception (...)
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  • The Cultural Origins of Cognitive Adaptations.David Papineau - 2005 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 56:24-25.
    According to an influential view in contemporary cognitive science, many human cognitive capacities are innate. The primary support for this view comes from ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments. In general outline, such arguments contrast the meagre informational input to cognitive development with its rich informational output. Consider the ease with which humans acquire languages, become facile at attributing psychological states (‘folk psychology’), gain knowledge of biological kinds (‘folk biology’), or come to understand basic physical processes (‘folk physics’). In all these cases, (...)
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  • Evolutionary theory and the ultimate-proximate distinction in the human behavioral sciences.T. C. Scott-Phillips, T. E. Dickins & S. A. West - unknown
    To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of (...)
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  • Swampman, teleosemantics and kind essences.David Papineau - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-19.
    One powerful and influential approach to mental representation analyses representation in terms of biological functions, and biological functions in terms of histories of natural selection. This “teleosemantic” package, however, faces a familiar challenge. Surely representation depends only on the present-day structures of cognitive systems, and not on their historical provenance. “Swampman” drives the point home. Suppose a bolt of lightning creates an intrinsic duplicate of a human being in a steamy tropic swamp; will not this creature be representing its surroundings, (...)
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  • In What Sense Can There Be Evolution by Natural Selection Without Perfect Inheritance?Pierrick Bourrat - 2019 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (1):13-31.
    ABSTRACTIn Darwinian Population and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith brought the topic of natural selection back to the forefront of philosophy of biology, highlighting different issues surro...
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  • Populations without Reproduction.Mathieu Charbonneau - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):727-740.
    For a population to undergo evolution by natural selection, it is assumed that the constituents of the population form parent-offspring lineages, that is, that they must reproduce. I challenge this assumption by dividing the notion of reproduction into two subprocesses, that is, multiplication and inheritance, that produce parent-offspring lineages between the parts of a population, and I show that their population-level roles, generation and memory, respectively, can be effected by processes that do not rely on such local-level lineages. I further (...)
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  • Niche Inheritance: A Possible Basis for Classifying Multiple Inheritance Systems in Evolution.John Odling-Smee - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (3):276-289.
    The theory of niche construction adds a second general inheritance system, ecological inheritance, to evolution . Ecological inheritance is the inheritance, via an external environment, of one or more natural selection pressures previously modified by niche-constructing organisms. This addition means descendant organisms inherit genes, and biotically transformed selection pressures in their environments, from their ancestors. The combined inheritance is called niche inheritance. Niche inheritance is used as a basis for classifying the multiple genetic and non-genetic, inheritance systems currently being proposed (...)
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  • Memes revisited.Kim Sterelny - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1):145-165.
    In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and the replication and spread of memes. I further argue that both cultural group selection and the vertical flow of cultural information have been (...)
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  • A Dual Proposal Of Minimal Conditions For Intentionality.Sérgio Farias de Souza Filho - 2022 - Synthese 200 (115):1-22.
    Naturalist theories of representation have been attacked on the grounds of being too liberal on the minimal conditions for intentionality: they treat several states that are not representational as genuine representations. Behind this attack lies the problem of demarcation: what are the minimal conditions for intentionality that a state should satisfy to be genuinely representational? What are the limits of intentionality? This paper develops a dual proposal to solve this problem. First, I defend the explanatory role criterion in order to (...)
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  • Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science.Christophe Malaterre, Francis Lareau, Davide Pulizzotto & Jonathan St-Onge - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2883-2923.
    As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms (...)
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  • Environmental Inheritance: Conceptual Ambiguities and Theoretical Issues.Gaëlle Pontarotti - 2020 - Biological Theory 17 (1):36-51.
    The concept of biological inheritance has recently been extended so as to integrate, among other elements, parts of organisms’ environments. The literature refers to the trans-generational reconstruction of these parts in terms of environmental or ecological inheritance. This article’s main objective is to clarify the different meanings of "environmental inheritance," to underline so far unnoticed theoretical difficulties associated to this polysemous notion and to consequently argue that inheritance, even when extended, should be theoretically distinguished from trans-generational environmental stability. After disentangling (...)
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  • Mapping Biological Transmission: An Empirical, Dynamical, and Evolutionary Approach.Livio Riboli-Sasco & Francesca Merlin - 2017 - Acta Biotheoretica 65 (2):97-115.
    The current debate over extending inheritance and its evolutionary impact has focused on adding new categories of non-genetic factors to the classical transmission of DNA, and on trying to redefine inheritance. Transmitted factors have been mainly characterized by their directions of transmission and the way they store variations. In this paper, we leave aside the issue of defining inheritance. We rather try to build an evolutionary conceptual framework that allows for tracing most, if not all forms of transmission and makes (...)
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  • Organisms as natural purposes: The contemporary evolutionary perspective.D. M. Walsh - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4):771-791.
    I argue that recent advances in developmental biology demonstrate the inadequacy of suborganismal mechanism. The category of the organism, construed as a ’natural purpose’ should play an ineliminable role in explaining ontogenetic development and adaptive evolution. According to Kant the natural purposiveness of organisms cannot be demonstrated to be an objective principle in nature, nor can purposiveness figure in genuine explain. I attempt to argue, by appeal to recent work on self-organization, that the purposiveness of organisms is a natural phenomenon (...)
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  • Cultural Inheritance and Fisher’s “Fundamental Theorem” of Natural Selection.Samir Okasha - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (3):290-299.
    The idea that natural selection can operate on cultural as well as genetic variation is central to recent theories of cultural evolution. This raises an overarching question: how much of traditional evolutionary theory, which was formulated in population-genetic terms, can survive intact once the possibility of cultural inheritance is taken into account? This question is addressed in relation to R. A. Fisher’s “fundamental theorem” of natural selection. Though Fisher’s theorem may appear to be an essentially genetic result, a version of (...)
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  • The Future of Human Evolution.Russell Powell - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (1):145-175.
    There is a tendency in both scientific and humanistic disciplines to think of biological evolution in humans as significantly impeded if not completely overwhelmed by the robust cultural and technological capabilities of the species. The aim of this article is to make sense of and evaluate this claim. In Section 2 , I flesh out the argument that humans are ‘insulated’ from ordinary evolutionary mechanisms in terms of our contemporary biological understandings of phenotypic plasticity, niche construction, and cultural transmission. In (...)
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  • The inheritance of features.Matteo Mameli - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):365-399.
    Since the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, the standard account of the inheritance of features has been in terms of DNA-copying and DNA-transmission. This theory is just a version of the old theory according to which the inheritance of features is explained by the transfer at conception of some developmentally privileged material from parents to offspring. This paper does the following things: (1) it explains what the inheritance of features is; (2) it explains how the DNA-centric theory (...)
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  • On Dennett and the natural sciences of free will.Matteo Mameli - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (5):731-742.
    _Freedom Evolves _is an ambitious book. The aim is to show that free will is compatible with what physics, biology and the neurosciences tell us about the way we function and that, moreover, these sciences can help us clarify and vindicate the most important aspects of the common-sense conception of free will, those aspects that play a fundamental role in the way we live our lives and in the way we organize our society.
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  • Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2005.Stephen P. Weldon - 2005 - Isis 96:1-242.
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  • Rethinking Inheritance.Kim Sterelny - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (3):215-217.
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  • (1 other version)'Genes, Memes and Human History' by Stephen Shennan. [REVIEW]Kim Sterelny - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (2):249-257.
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  • Inatismo moral.Matheus de Mesquita Silveira - 2017 - Dissertatio 45 (S5):97-122.
    Um aspecto inerente à vida social está no fato dela ser regida em suas diferentes esferas por regras de convivência. Contudo, não é qualquer forma de interação social que pode ser colocada dentro do escopo da moralidade. O ponto central deste trabalho é encontrar um princípio de distinção entre as exigências que regem o comportamento moral daquelas presentes em outras formas de interação social. Indicarei no presente texto a possibilidade de uma abordagem evolucionista para esta questão. Defenderei que exigências morais (...)
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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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  • Human domestication and the roles of human agency in human evolution.Lorenzo Del Savio & Matteo Mameli - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (2):1-25.
    Are humans a domesticated species? How is this issue related to debates on the roles of human agency in human evolution? This article discusses four views on human domestication: Darwin’s view; the view of those who link human domestication to anthropogenic niche construction and, more specifically, to sedentism; the view of those who link human domestication to selection against aggression and the domestication syndrome; and a novel view according to which human domestication can be conceived of in terms of a (...)
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  • Extended inheritance as reconstruction of extended organization: the paradigmatic case of symbiosis.Gaëlle Pontarotti - 2016 - Lato Sensu: Revue de la Société de Philosophie des Sciences 3 (1):93-102.
    The paper outlines the contours of an organizational perspective on extended inheritance. Based on theoretical studies about biological organization and extended physiology, this perspective allows for the conception of extended biological legacies while keeping a theoretically indispensable distinction between biological systems and their environment. In this context, the line of demarcation between these systems and their surroundings is modelled on an organizational criterion and on the related conceptual distinction between organizational constraints, whose specific role is to harness flows of matter (...)
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  • Extended inheritance from an organizational point of view.Gaëlle Pontarotti - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (4):430-448.
    In this paper, I argue that the increasing data about non-genetic inheritance requires the construction of a new conceptual framework that should complement the inclusive approaches already discussed in the literature. More precisely, I hold that this framework should be epistemologically relevant for evolutionary biologists in capturing the limits of extended inheritance and in reassessing the boundaries of biological systems that transmit traits to their offspring. I outline the first elements of an organizational account of extended inheritance. In this account, (...)
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  • Conceptualizing the Environment in Natural Sciences: Guest Editorial.Gaëlle Pontarotti, Antoine C. Dussault & Francesca Merlin - 2020 - Biological Theory 17 (1):1-3.
    The concept of biological inheritance has recently been extended so as to integrate, among other elements, parts of organisms’ environments. The literature refers to the trans-generational reconstruction of these parts in terms of environmental or ecological inheritance. This article’s main objective is to clarify the different meanings of "environmental inheritance," to underline so far unnoticed theoretical difficulties associated to this polysemous notion and to consequently argue that inheritance, even when extended, should be theoretically distinguished from trans-generational environmental stability. After disentangling (...)
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  • Is Non-genetic Inheritance Just a Proximate Mechanism? A Corroboration of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.Alex Mesoudi, Simon Blanchet, Anne Charmantier, Étienne Danchin, Laurel Fogarty, Eva Jablonka, Kevin N. Laland, Thomas J. H. Morgan, Gerd B. Müller, F. John Odling-Smee & Benoît Pujol - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (3):189-195.
    What role does non-genetic inheritance play in evolution? In recent work we have independently and collectively argued that the existence and scope of non-genetic inheritance systems, including epigenetic inheritance, niche construction/ecological inheritance, and cultural inheritance—alongside certain other theory revisions—necessitates an extension to the neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis (MS) in the form of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). However, this argument has been challenged on the grounds that non-genetic inheritance systems are exclusively proximate mechanisms that serve the ultimate function of calibrating organisms (...)
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  • The conceptual critique of innateness.Stefan Linquist - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (5):e12492.
    It is widely recognized that the innate versus acquired distinction is a false dichotomy. Yet many scientists continue to describe certain traits as “innate” and take this to imply that those traits are not acquired, or “unlearned.” This article asks what cognitive role, if any, the concept of innateness should play in the psychological and behavioural sciences. I consider three arguments for eliminating innateness from scientific discourse. First, the classification of a trait as innate is thought to discourage empirical research (...)
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  • (1 other version)Cognition as a Social Skill.Sally Haslanger - 2019 - Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (1):5-25.
    Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so (...)
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  • How should we distinguish between selectable and circumstantial traits?Ciprian Jeler - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (1):1-22.
    There is surprisingly little philosophical work on conceptually spelling out the difference between the traits on which natural selection may be said to act (e.g. “having a high running speed”) and mere circumstantial traits (e.g. “happening to be in the path of a forest fire”). I label this issue the “selectable traits problem” and, in this paper, I propose a solution for it. I first show that, contrary to our first intuition, simply equating selectable traits with heritable ones is not (...)
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  • The Price Equation and Extended Inheritance.Heikki Helanterä & Tobias Uller - 2010 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 2 (20130604).
    The presence of various mechanisms of non-genetic inheritance is one of the main problems for current evolutionary theory according to several critics. Sufficient empirical and conceptual reasons exist to take this claim seriously, but there is little consensus on the implications of multiple inheritance systems for evolutionary processes. Here we use the Price Equation as a starting point for a discussion of the differences between four recently proposed categories of inheritance systems; genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic. Specifically, we address how (...)
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  • Categorizing Phenotypic Plasticity: An Analysis of Its Role in Human Cognitive Evolution.Mirko Farina - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (2):103-121.
    I identify six types of phenotypic plasticity and categorize them with respect to their cognitive status. I look at differences and relations between some of these types of plasticity and then analyze how phenotypic outcomes are transmitted across generations. I engage with the relevant literature on developmental scaffolding and entrenchment in cultural evolution. I argue that that the typology I present here can be beneficial for such a debate and therefore instructive to better comprehend the evolution and development of human (...)
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  • Ethischer Diskurs zu Epigenetik und Genomeditierung: die Gefahr eines (epi-)genetischen Determinismus und naturwissenschaftlich strittiger Grundannahmen.Karla Karoline Sonne Kalinka Alex & Eva C. Winkler - 2021 - In Boris Fehse, Ferdinand Hucho, Sina Bartfeld, Stephan Clemens, Tobias Erb, Heiner Fangerau, Jürgen Hampel, Martin Korte, Lilian Marx-Stölting, Stefan Mundlos, Angela Osterheider, Anja Pichl, Jens Reich, Hannah Schickl, Silke Schicktanz, Jochen Taupitz, Jörn Walter, Eva Winkler & Martin Zenke (eds.), Fünfter Gentechnologiebericht: Sachstand und Perspektiven für Forschung und Anwendung. pp. 299-323.
    Slightly modified excerpt from the section 13.4 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick (translated into englisch): This chapter is based on an analysis of ethical debates on epigenetics and genome editing, debates, in which ethical arguments relating to future generations and justice play a central role. The analysis aims to contextualize new developments in genetic engineering, such as genome and epigenome editing, ethically. At the beginning, the assumptions of "genetic determinism," on which "genetic essentialism" is based, of "epigenetic determinism" as well as "genetic" (...)
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  • Explanatory loops and the limits of genetic reductionism.Martin Carrier & Patrick Finzer - 2006 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 20 (3):267 – 283.
    We reconstruct genetic determinism as a reductionist thesis to the effect that the molecular properties of cells can be accounted for to a great extent by their genetic outfit. The non-reductionist arguments offered at this molecular level often use the relationship between structure and function as their point of departure. By contrast, we develop a non-reductionist argument that is confined to the structural characteristics of biomolecules; no appeal to functions is made. We raise two kinds of objections against the reducibility (...)
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  • Unifying heritability in evolutionary theory.Pierrick Bourrat - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 91 (C):201-210.
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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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  • The distinction between innate and acquired characteristics.Paul Griffiths - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The idea that some characteristics of an organism are explained by the organism's intrinsic nature, whilst others reflect the influence of the environment is an ancient one. It has even been argued that this distinction is itself part of the evolved psychology of the human species. The distinction played an important role in the history of philosophy as the locus of the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism discussed in another entry in this encyclopedia. This entry, however, focuses on twentieth-century accounts (...)
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  • Traits, Genes, and Coding.Michael Wheeler - 1973 - In Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy of biology. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books. pp. 369--401.
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