Research on animal behavior is typically organized according to a combination of two influential frameworks: Ernst Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate causes, and Niko Tinbergen’s “four questions”. My aim is to debunk two common interpretive misconceptions about Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction and its relationship to Tinbergen’s four questions, and to offer a new interpretation that avoids both. The first misconception is that the proximate–ultimate distinction maps cleanly onto Tinbergen’s four questions, marking a boundary between Tinbergen’s evolutionary and survival value questions (...) versus developmental and mechanistic questions. The second is that Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction is meant to rule out the relevance of proximate causes to evolutionary explanations. I argue that neither is plausible given the text and Mayr’s philosophical aims, namely, to argue that evolutionary biology cannot be reduced to either the physical sciences or to other areas of biology. Through a reconstruction of Mayr’s anti-reductionist argument, I develop an interpretation according to which the proximate–ultimate distinction marks two ways that teleological reasoning can be naturalistically grounded in biology, corresponding to Mayr’s distinction between teleonomic and adapted systems. Mayr distinguishes reduction, which the proximate–ultimate distinction is meant to block, from analysis, through which he allows that proximate causes, causes that are neither proximate nor ultimate, and chance can all contribute to evolutionary explanations. I conclude by suggesting some ways in which the interpretation defended here reframes our understanding of Mayr’s disagreements with some evolutionary-developmental biologists. (shrink)

Despite the proliferation of articles and edited volumes on EvoDevo (evolutionary developmental biology), only a couple of monographs dealing systematically with the conceptual challenges posed by the reintroduction of development into the structure of evolutionary theory are available (Gould 2002; Amundson 2005). In Requiem for the Centaurus: An Epistemological Approach to Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Footnote1 Gustavo Caponi reorganizes the pieces of work he has been publishing in recent years on different historical and conceptual aspects of evolutionary biology into a long, (...) coherent, elegant, and thought-provoking argument that deserves to be read from beginning to end. (shrink)

Systems Biology and the Modern Synthesis are recent versions of two classical biological paradigms that are known as structuralism and functionalism, or internalism and externalism. According to functionalism (or externalism), living matter is a fundamentally passive entity that owes its organization to external forces (functions that shape organs) or to an external organizing agent (natural selection). Structuralism (or internalism), is the view that living matter is an intrinsically active entity that is capable of organizing itself from within, with purely internal (...) processes that are based on mathematical principles and physical laws. At the molecular level, the basic mechanism of the Modern Synthesis is molecular copying, the process that leads in the short run to heredity and in the long run to natural selection. The basic mechanism of Systems Biology, instead, is self-assembly, the process by which many supramolecular structures are formed by the spontaneous aggregation of their components. In addition to molecular copying and self-assembly, however, molecular biology has uncovered also a third great mechanism at the heart of life. The existence of the genetic code and of many other organic codes in Nature tells us that molecular coding is a biological reality and we need therefore a framework that accounts for it. This framework is Code biology, the study of the codes of life, a new field of research that brings to light an entirely new dimension of the living world and gives us a completely new understanding of the origin and the evolution of life. (shrink)

Since its appearance, Evolutionary Developmental Biology (EvoDevo) has been called an emerging research program, a new paradigm, a new interdisciplinary field, or even a revolution. Behind these formulas, there is the awareness that something is changing in biology. EvoDevo is characterized by a variety of accounts and by an expanding theoretical framework. From an epistemological point of view, what is the relationship between EvoDevo and previous biological tradition? Is EvoDevo the carrier of a new message about how to conceive evolution (...) and development? Furthermore, is it necessary to rethink the way we look at both of these processes? EvoDevo represents the attempt to synthesize two logics, that of evolution and that of development, and the way we conceive one affects the other. This synthesis is far from being fulfilled, but an adequate theory of development may represent a further step towards this achievement. In this article, an epistemological analysis of EvoDevo is presented, with particular attention paid to the relations to the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) and the Standard Evolutionary Synthesis (SET). (shrink)

The current evolutionary taxonomy is biased towards traits that enhance the organism’s fitness. Here, an extended taxonomy aimed to correct this bias is proposed, which distinguishes among different categories of non-fitness traits based on their usefulness for the organism as well as their origin. It is suggested these new non-fitness categories could help to solve the controversy surrounding the term exaptation in evolutionary psychology.