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Embedded Mechanisms and Phylogenetics

Lucas J. Matthews

Philosophy of Science 82 (5):1116-1126 (2015)

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Across the great divide: pluralism and the hunt for missing heritability.Lucas J. Matthews & Eric Turkheimer - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):2297-2311.details Genetic explanation of complex human behavior presents an excellent test case for pluralism. Although philosophers agree that successful scientific investigation of behavior is pluralistic, there remains disagreement regarding integration and elimination—is the plurality of approaches here to stay, or merely a waystation on the road to monism? In this paper we introduce an issue taken very seriously by scientists yet mostly ignored by philosophers—the missing heritability problem—and assess its implications for disagreement among pluralists. We argue that the missing heritability problem, (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 14 citations
On closing the gap between philosophical concepts and their usage in scientific practice: a lesson from the debate about natural selection as a mechanism.Lucas J. Matthews - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55:21-28.details In addition to theorizing about the role and value of mechanisms in scientific explanation or the causal structure of the world, there is a fundamental task of getting straight what a ‘mechanism’ is in the first place. Broadly, this paper is about the challenge of application: the challenge of aligning one's philosophical account of a scientific concept with the manner in which that concept is actually used in scientific practice. This paper considers a case study of the challenge of application (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 4 citations
On mechanistic reasoning in unexpected places: the case of population genetics.Lucas J. Matthews - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):999-1018.details A strong case has been made for the role and value of mechanistic reasoning in process-oriented sciences, such as molecular biology and neuroscience. This paper shifts focus to assess the role of mechanistic reasoning in an area where it is neither obvious nor expected: population genetics. Population geneticists abstract away from the causal-mechanical details of individual organisms and, instead, use mathematics to describe population-level, statistical phenomena. This paper, first, develops a framework for the identification of mechanistic reasoning where it is (...) Download Export citation Bookmark 4 citations

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