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  1. Sculpting the space of actions. Explaining human action by integrating intentions and mechanisms.Machiel Keestra - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Amsterdam
    How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations in (...)
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  • The Limitations of Hierarchical Organization.Angela Potochnik & Brian McGill - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (1):120-140.
    The concept of hierarchical organization is commonplace in science. Subatomic particles compose atoms, which compose molecules; cells compose tissues, which compose organs, which compose organisms; etc. Hierarchical organization is particularly prominent in ecology, a field of research explicitly arranged around levels of ecological organization. The concept of levels of organization is also central to a variety of debates in philosophy of science. Yet many difficulties plague the concept of discrete hierarchical levels. In this paper, we show how these difficulties undermine (...)
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  • Is Complexity a Scientific Concept?Paul Taborsky - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 47:51-59.
    Complexity science has proliferated across academic domains in recent years. A question arises as to whether any useful sense of ‘generalized complexity ’ can be abstracted from the various versions of complexity to be found in the literature, and whether it could prove fruitful in a scientific sense. Most attempts at defining complexity center around two kinds of notions: Structural, and temporal or dynamic. Neither of these is able to provide a foundation for the intuitive or generalized notion when taken (...)
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  • How much can we know about the causes of evolutionary trends?Derek D. Turner - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (3):341-357.
    One of the first questions that paleontologists ask when they identify a large-scale trend in the fossil record (e.g., size increase, complexity increase) is whether it is passive or driven. In this article, I explore two questions about driven trends: (1) what is the underlying cause or source of the directional bias? and (2) has the strength of the directional bias changed over time? I identify two underdetermination problems that prevent scientists from giving complete answers to these two questions.
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  • Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscapes: 1932 vs. 1988.Massimo Pigliucci - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (5):591-603.
    Sewall Wright introduced the metaphor of evolution on “adaptive landscapes” in a pair of papers published in 1931 and 1932. The metaphor has been one of the most influential in modern evolutionary biology, although recent theoretical advancements show that it is deeply flawed and may have actually created research questions that are not, in fact, fecund. In this paper I examine in detail what Wright actually said in the 1932 paper, as well as what he thought of the matter at (...)
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  • Two explanations of evolutionary progress.Gregory Radick - 2000 - Biology and Philosophy 15 (4):475-491.
    Natural selection explains how living forms are fitted to theirconditions of life. Darwin argued that selection also explains what hecalled the gradual advancement of the organisation, i.e.evolutionary progress. Present-day selectionists disagree. In theirview, it is happenstance that sustains conditions favorable to progress,and therefore happenstance, not selection, that explains progress. Iargue that the disagreement here turns not on whether there exists aselection-based condition bias – a belief now attributed to Darwin – but on whether there needs to be such a bias (...)
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  • Environmental complexity and the evolution of cognition.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2001 - In Robert J. Sternberg & James C. Kaufman (eds.), The Evolution of Intelligence. Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 233--249.
    One problem faced in discussions of the evolution of intelligence is the need to get a precise fix on what is to be explained. Terms like "intelligence," "cognition" and "mind" do not have simple and agreed-upon meanings, and the differences between conceptions of intelligence have consequences for evolutionary explanation. I hope the papers in this volume will enable us to make progress on this problem. The present contribution is mostly focused on these basic and foundational issues, although the last section (...)
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  • Forma, función y arquitectura biológica.Giorgio Airoldi & Cristian Saborido - 2022 - Cuadernos Filosóficos / Segunda Época 19.
    Los conceptos de evolución y cambio evolutivo son a la vez laxos y polisémicos: se aplican a fenómenos muy diferentes y no siempre se definen con precisión. La aplicación extendida del paradigma neo-darwinista clásico, además, suele imponer un esquema adaptacionista al análisis de los hechos evolutivos, en el cual las funciones juegan un papel lógicamente anterior a los rasgos y sus formas. En este artículo proponemos, como etapa previa a la formulación de hipótesis sobre las causas del cambio, un modelo (...)
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  • How is cancer complex?Anya Plutynski - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-30.
    Cancer is typically spoken of as a “complex” disease. But, in what sense are cancers “complex”? Is there one sense, or several? What implications does this complexity have – both for how we study, and how we intervene upon cancers? The aim of this paper is first, to clarify the variety of senses in which cancer is spoken of as "complex" in the scientific literature, and second, to discover what explanatory and predictive roles such features play.
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  • Biological Individuals.Robert A. Wilson & Matthew J. Barker - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...)
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  • The Evolution of Complexity.Mark Bedau - 2009 - In Barberousse Anouk, Morange M. & Pradeau T. (eds.), Mapping the Future of Biology. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 266. Springer.
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  • Interweaving categories: Styles, paradigms, and models.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (4):628-639.
    Analytical categories of scientific cultures have typically been used both exclusively and universally. For instance, when styles of scientific research are employed in attempts to understand and narrate science, styles alone are usually employed. This article is a thought experiment in interweaving categories. What would happen if rather than employ a single category, we instead investigated several categories simultaneously? What would we learn about the practices and theories, the agents and materials, and the political-technological impact of science if we analyzed (...)
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  • The Varieties of Parsimony in Psychology.Mike Dacey - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (4):414-437.
    Philosophers and psychologists make many different, seemingly incompatible parsimony claims in support of competing models of cognition in nonhuman animals. This variety of parsimony claims is problematic. Firstly, it is difficult to justify each specific variety. This problem is especially salient for Morgan's Canon, perhaps the most important variety of parsimony claimed. Secondly, there is no systematic way of adjudicating between particular claims when they conflict. I argue for a view of parsimony in comparative psychology that solves these problems, based (...)
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  • Narratives, mechanisms and progress in historical science.Adrian Mitchell Currie - 2014 - Synthese 191 (6):1-21.
    Geologists, Paleontologists and other historical scientists are frequently concerned with narrative explanations targeting single cases. I show that two distinct explanatory strategies are employed in narratives, simple and complex. A simple narrative has minimal causal detail and is embedded in a regularity, whereas a complex narrative is more detailed and not embedded. The distinction is illustrated through two case studies: the ‘snowball earth’ explanation of Neoproterozoic glaciation and recent attempts to explain gigantism in Sauropods. This distinction is revelatory of historical (...)
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  • Evolution unbound: releasing the arrow of complexity.Kevin B. Korb & Alan Dorin - 2011 - Biology and Philosophy 26 (3):317-338.
    The common opinion has been that evolution results in the continuing development of more complex forms of life, generally understood as more complex organisms. The arguments supporting that opinion have recently come under scrutiny and been found wanting. Nevertheless, the appearance of increasing complexity remains. So, is there some sense in which evolution does grow complexity? Artificial life simulations have consistently failed to reproduce even the appearance of increasing complexity, which poses a challenge. Simulations, as much as scientific theories, are (...)
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  • Cartesian cut, Heisenberg cut, and the concept of complexity.Harald Atmanspacher - 1997 - World Futures 49 (3):333-355.
    (1997). Cartesian cut, Heisenberg cut, and the concept of complexity. World Futures: Vol. 49, The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information, pp. 333-355.
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  • Functional complexity in organisms: Parts as proxies. [REVIEW]Daniel W. McShea - 2000 - Biology and Philosophy 15 (5):641-668.
    The functional complexity, or the number of functions, of organisms hasfigured prominently in certain theoretical and empirical work inevolutionary biology. Large-scale trends in functional complexity andcorrelations between functional complexity and other variables, such assize, have been proposed. However, the notion of number of functions hasalso been operationally intractable, in that no method has been developedfor counting functions in an organism in a systematic and reliable way.Thus, studies have had to rely on the largely unsupported assumption thatnumber of functions can be (...)
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  • Confrontation of the cybernetic definition of a living individual with the real world.Bernard Korzeniewski - 2005 - Acta Biotheoretica 53 (1):1-28.
    The cybernetic definition of a living individual proposed previously (Korzeniewski, 2001) is very abstract and therefore describes the essence of life in a very formal and general way. In the present article this definition is reformulated in order to determine clearly the relation between life in general and a living individual in particular, and it is further explained and defended. Next, the cybernetic definition of a living individual is confronted with the real world. It is demonstrated that numerous restrictions imposed (...)
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  • Explanatory pluralism in paleobiology.Todd A. Grantham - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):236.
    This paper is a defense of "explanatory pluralism" (i.e., the view that some events can be correctly explained in two distinct ways). To defend pluralism, I identify two distinct (but compatible) styles of explanation in paleobiology. The first approach ("actual sequence explanation") traces out the particular forces that affect each species. The second approach treats the trend as "passive" or "random" diffusion away from a boundary in morphological space. I argue that while these strategies are distinct, some trends are correctly (...)
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  • The emergence of value: human norms in a natural world.Lawrence Cahoone - 2023 - Albany: State University of New York Press.
    Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.
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  • Methodology in evolutionary psychology.Sally Ferguson - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (5):635-650.
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  • Aspects of Complexity in Life and Science.Claus Emmeche - 1997 - Philosophica 59 (1).
    A short review of complexity research from the perspective of history and philosophy of biology is presented. Complexity and its emergence has scientific and metaphysical meanings. From its beginning, biology was a science of complex systems, but with the advent of electronic computing and the possibility of simulating mathematical models of complicated systems, new intuitions of complexity emerged, together with attempts to devise quantitative measures of complexity. But can we quantify the complex?
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  • Does science have a “global goal?”: A critique of Hull's view of conceptual progress. [REVIEW]Todd Grantham - 1994 - Biology and Philosophy 9 (1):85-97.
    Hull's recent work in evolutionary epistemology is marred by a deep tension. While he maintains that conceptual and biological evolution are both driven by selection processes, he also claims that only the former is globally progressive. In this paper I formulate this tension and present four possible responses (including Hull's). I argue that Hull's position rests on the assumption that there is a goal which is sufficiently general to describe most scientific activity yet precise enough to guide research. Working from (...)
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  • La guerra de la Naturaleza, la carestía y la muerte como fuente del diseño de los seres vivos.Giorgio Airoldi & Cristian Saborido - 2020 - Endoxa 46:123.
    El proyecto del ‘Darwinismo Formal’ de Alan Grafen propone una formulación matemática de la teoría de Darwin que pretende demostrar que la selección natural moldea los rasgos fenotípicos a través de la maximización de la eficacia. El proyecto de Grafen reposa sobre tres premisas: la selección natural es la única fuerza que moldea los fenotipos; la eficacia es la única medida de le evolución; y el diseño biológico surge como resultado de un proceso de optimización selectiva. En este trabajo argumentamos (...)
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  • Major problems in evolutionary transitions: how a metabolic perspective can enrich our understanding of macroevolution.Maureen A. O’Malley & Russell Powell - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (2):159-189.
    The model of major transitions in evolution devised by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry has exerted tremendous influence over evolutionary theorists. Although MTE has been criticized for inconsistently combining different types of event, its ongoing appeal lies in depicting hierarchical increases in complexity by means of evolutionary transitions in individuality. In this paper, we consider the implications of major evolutionary events overlooked by MTE and its ETI-oriented successors, specifically the biological oxygenation of Earth, and the acquisitions of mitochondria and plastids. By (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)The biological sciences can act as a ground for ethics.Michael Ruse - 2009 - In Francisco José Ayala & Robert Arp (eds.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of biology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 297–315.
    This paper is interested in the relationship between evolutionary thinking and moral behavior and commitments, ethics. There is a traditional way of forging or conceiving of the relationship. This is traditional evolutionary ethics, known as Social Darwinism. Many think that this position is morally pernicious, a redescription of the worst aspects of modern, laissez-faire capitalism in fancy biological language. It is argued that, in fact, there is much more to be said for Social Darwinism than many think. In respects, it (...)
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  • (1 other version)Evolution.Roberta L. Millstein - 2017 - Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy.
    Evolution in its contemporary meaning in biology typically refers to the changes in the proportions of biological types in a population over time (see the entry on the concept of evolution to 1872 for earlier meanings). As evolution is too large of a topic to address thoroughly in one entry, the primary goal of this entry is to serve as a broad overview of contemporary issues in evolution with links to other entries where more in-depth discussion can be found. The (...)
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  • De la selección natural al diseño: una propuesta de extensión del darwinismo formal.Giorgio Airoldi & Cristian Saborido - 2017 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 8 (1):71--80.
    Darwin’s claim that Natural Selection, through optimization of fitness, explains complex biological design has not yet been properly formalized. Alan Grafen’s Formal Darwinism Project aims at providing such a formalization and at demonstrating that fitness maximization is coherent with results from Population Genetics, usually interpreted as denying it. We suggest that Grafen’s proposal suffers from some limitations linked to its concept of design as optimized fitness. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a classification of evolutionary facts based on (...)
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  • Feminist Philosophy of Science.Lynn Hankinson Nelson - 2002 - In Peter K. Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of science. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. pp. 312–331.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.
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  • Bacteria at the high table.Kim Sterelny - 1999 - Biology and Philosophy 14 (3):459-470.
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  • Evolutionary trends and goal directedness.Daniel W. McShea - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-26.
    The conventional wisdom declares that evolution is not goal directed, that teleological considerations play no part in our understanding of evolutionary trends. Here I argue that, to the contrary, under a current view of teleology, field theory, most evolutionary trends would have to be considered goal directed to some degree. Further, this view is consistent with a modern scientific outlook, and more particularly with evolutionary theory today. Field theory argues that goal directedness is produced by higher-level fields that direct entities (...)
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  • Syntactic Measures of Complexity.Bruce Edmonds - unknown
    1.1 - Background - page 17 1.2 - The Style of Approach - page 18 1.3 - Motivation - page 19 1.4 - Style of Presentation - page 20 1.5 - Outline of the Thesis - page 21..
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  • A biosemiotic approach to the question of meaning.Jesper Hoffmeyer - 2010 - Zygon 45 (2):367-390.
    A sign is something that refers to something else. Signs, whether of natural or cultural origin, act by provoking a receptive system, human or nonhuman, to form an interpretant (a movement or a brain activity) that somehow relates the system to this "something else." Semiotics sees meaning as connected to the formation of interpretants. In a biosemiotic understanding living systems are basically engaged in semiotic interactions, that is, interpretative processes, and organic evolution exhibits an inherent tendency toward an increase in (...)
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  • Natural artificiality, niche construction, and the content-open mediation of human behavior.Phillip Honenberger - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-25.
    There are at least two senses in which human beings can be called “naturally artificial”: being adapted for creation of and participation in niche constructed environments, and being adapted for creation of and participation in such environments despite an exceptional indeterminacy in the details of the niche constructed environments themselves. The former puts human beings in a common category with many niche-constructing organisms while the latter is arguably distinctive of our species. I explain how this can be so by developing (...)
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  • Complexity in Evolution: a Skeptical Assesment.Daniel W. Mcshea - 1997 - Philosophica 59 (1).
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  • Discussion: Kuhn’s Evolutionary Analogy in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and “The Road since Structure”.Thomas A. C. Reydon & Paul Hoyningen-Huene - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (3):468-476.
    Recently, Barbara Renzi argued that Kuhn's account of scientific change is undermined by mismatches in the analogy that Kuhn supposedly draws between scientific change and biological evolution. We argue that Renzi's criticism is inadequate to Kuhn's account of scientific change, as Kuhn does not draw any precise analogy between the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution nor aims to argue that the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution are similar in any important respects. Therefore, pointing to mismatches between (...)
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  • The notion of progress in evolutionary biology – the unresolved problem and an empirical suggestion.Bernd Rosslenbroich - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (1):41-70.
    Modern biology is ambivalent about the notion of evolutionary progress. Although most evolutionists imply in their writings that they still understand large-scale macroevolution as a somewhat progressive process, the use of the term “progress” is increasingly criticized and avoided. The paper shows that this ambivalence has a long history and results mainly from three problems: (1) The term “progress” carries historical, theoretical and social implications which are not congruent with modern knowledge of the course of evolution; (2) An incongruence exists (...)
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  • A Conceptual Analysis of Evolutionary Theory for Teacher Education.Esther M. van Dijk & Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2010 - Science & Education 19 (6-8):655-677.
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  • Complexity and technological evolution: What everybody knows?Krist Vaesen & Wybo Houkes - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1245-1268.
    The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations. Here we argue that there is insufficient credible evidence in favor of or against this technological complexity thesis. For one thing, the few datasets that are available hardly constitute a representative sample. For another, they substantiate very specific, and usually different versions of the complexity thesis or, even (...)
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  • The unity of neuroscience: a flat view.Arnon Levy - 2016 - Synthese 193 (12):3843-3863.
    This paper offers a novel view of unity in neuroscience. I set out by discussing problems with the classical account of unity-by-reduction, due to Oppenheim and Putnam. That view relies on a strong notion of levels, which has substantial problems. A more recent alternative, the mechanistic “mosaic” view due to Craver, does not have such problems. But I argue that the mosaic ideal of unity is too minimal, and we should, if possible, aspire for more. Relying on a number of (...)
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  • Philosophical Issues in Recent Paleontology.Derek D. Turner - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (7):494-505.
    The distinction between idiographic science, which aims to reconstruct sequences of particular events, and nomothetic science, which aims to discover laws and regularities, is crucial for understanding the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Stephen Jay Gould at times seemed conflicted about whether to say (a) that idiographic science is fine as it is or (b) that paleontology would have more credibility if it were more nomothetic. Ironically, one of the lasting results of the paleobiological revolution was a new (...)
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  • A Trait-based framework for mutation bias as a driver of long-term evolutionary trends.Julian Z. Xue, André Costopoulos & Frédéric Guichard - 2016 - Complexity 21 (5):331-345.
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  • Order, complexity and benefits in social organizations and other organized structures.J. S. Shiner - 2000 - World Futures 55 (4):329-340.
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  • Typology and Natural Kinds in Evo-Devo.Ingo Brigandt - 2021 - In Nuño De La Rosa Laura & Müller Gerd (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Reference Guide. Springer. pp. 483-493.
    The traditional practice of establishing morphological types and investigating morphological organization has found new support from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), especially with respect to the notion of body plans. Despite recurring claims that typology is at odds with evolutionary thinking, evo-devo offers mechanistic explanations of the evolutionary origin, transformation, and evolvability of morphological organization. In parallel, philosophers have developed non-essentialist conceptions of natural kinds that permit kinds to exhibit variation and undergo change. This not only facilitates a construal of species (...)
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  • The operator hierarchy : a chain of closures linking matter, life and artificial intelligence.G. A. J. M. Jagers op Akkerhuis - unknown
    Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 06 september 2010.
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