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What Genes Can't Do

MIT Press (2003)

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  1. Is a Cognitive Revolution in Theoretical Biology Underway?Tiago Rama - 2024 - Foundations of Science 1:1-22.
    The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...)
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • The Origins of Species Concepts.John Simpson Wilkins - 2003 - Dissertation, University of Melbourne
    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 (...)
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  • Life’s organization between matter and form: Neo-Aristotelian approaches and biosemiotics.Çağlar Karaca - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-40.
    In this paper, I discuss the neo-Aristotelian approaches, which usually reinterpret Aristotle’s ideas on form and/or borrow the notion of formal cause without engaging with the broader implications of Aristotle’s metaphysics. In opposition to these approaches, I claim that biosemiotics can propose an alternative view on life’s form. Specifically, I examine the proposals to replace the formal cause with gene-centrism, functionalism, and structuralism. After critically addressing these approaches, I discuss the problems of reconciling Aristotelianism with the modern view of life’s (...)
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  • Semiosis and Information: Meeting the Challenge of Information Science to Post-Reductionist Biosemiotics.Arran Gare - 2020 - Biosemiotics 13 (3):327-346.
    The concept of information and its relation to biosemiotics is a major area of contention among biosemioticians. Biosemioticians influenced by von Uexküll, Sebeok, Bateson and Peirce are critical of the way the concept as developed in information science has been applied to biology, while others believe that for biosemiotics to gain acceptance it will have to embrace information science and distance biosemiotics from Peirce’s philosophical work. Here I will defend the influence of Peirce on biosemiotics, arguing that information science and (...)
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  • How Biology Became Social and What It Means for Social Theory.Maurizio Meloni - 2014 - The Sociological Review 62:593-614.
    In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor (...)
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  • Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivism.Maurizio Meloni & Jack Reynolds - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10685-10708.
    The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to (...)
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  • Individuating Genes as Types or Individuals: Philosophical Implications on Individuality, Kinds, and Gene Concepts.Ruey-Lin Chen - unknown
    “What is a gene?” is an important philosophical question that has been asked over and over. This paper approaches this question by understanding it as the individuation problem of genes, because it implies the problem of identifying genes and identifying a gene presupposes individuating the gene. I argue that there are at least two levels of the individuation of genes. The transgenic technique can individuate “a gene” as an individual while the technique of gene mapping in classical genetics can only (...)
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  • Philosophy of Molecular Biology.Ingo Brigandt - 2018 - eLS: Encyclopedia of Life Sciences.
    Ongoing empirical discoveries in molecular biology have generated novel conceptual challenges and perspectives. Philosophers of biology have reacted to these trends when investigating the practice of molecular biology and contributed to scientific debates on methodological and conceptual matters. This article reviews some major philosophical issues in molecular biology. First, philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation yield a notion of explanation in the context of molecular biology that does not have to rely on laws of nature and comports well with molecular discovery. (...)
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  • Conceptual Variation or Incoherence? Textbook Discourse on Genes in Six Countries.Niklas M. Gericke, Mariana Hagberg, Vanessa Carvalho dos Santos, Leyla Mariane Joaquim & Charbel N. El-Hani - 2014 - Science & Education 23 (2):381-416.
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  • Exploring Relationships Among Belief in Genetic Determinism, Genetics Knowledge, and Social Factors.Niklas Gericke, Rebecca Carver, Jérémy Castéra, Neima Alice Menezes Evangelista, Claire Coiffard Marre & Charbel N. El-Hani - 2017 - Science & Education 26 (10):1223-1259.
    Genetic determinism can be described as the attribution of the formation of traits to genes, where genes are ascribed more causal power than what scientific consensus suggests. Belief in genetic determinism is an educational problem because it contradicts scientific knowledge, and is a societal problem because it has the potential to foster intolerant attitudes such as racism and prejudice against sexual orientation. In this article, we begin by investigating the very nature of belief in genetic determinism. Then, we investigate whether (...)
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  • Kampourakis, K. (ed.) (2013): The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators.Charbel N. El-Hani - 2014 - Science & Education 23 (6):1381-1402.
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  • A Pluralist Framework to Address Challenges to the Modern Synthesis in Evolutionary Theory.Philippe Huneman - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (2):163-177.
    This paper uses formal Darwinism as elaborated by Alan Grafen to articulate an explanatory pluralism that casts light upon two strands of controversies running across evolutionary biology, viz., the place of organisms versus genes, and the role of adaptation. Formal Darwinism shows that natural selection can be viewed either physics-style, as a dynamics of alleles, or in the style of economics as an optimizing process. After presenting such pluralism, I argue first that whereas population genetics does not support optimization, optimality (...)
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  • The philosophical–anthropological foundations of Bennett and Hacker’s critique of neuroscience.Jasper van Buuren - 2015 - Continental Philosophy Review 49 (2):223-241.
    Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical (...)
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  • Objects and processes: two notions for understanding biological information.Agustín Mercado-Reyes, Pablo Padilla Longoria & Alfonso Arroyo-Santos - forthcoming - Journal of Theoretical Biology.
    In spite of being ubiquitous in life sciences, the concept of information is harshly criticized. Uses of the concept other than those derived from Shannon's theory are denounced as pernicious metaphors. We perform a computational experiment to explore whether Shannon's information is adequate to describe the uses of said concept in commonplace scientific practice. Our results show that semantic sequences do not have unique complexity values different from the value of meaningless sequences. This result suggests that quantitative theoretical frameworks do (...)
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  • The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (5):347-359.
    Although it may seem like a truism to assert that biology is the science that studies organisms, during the second half of the twentieth century the organism category disappeared from biological theory. Over the past decade, however, biology has begun to witness the return of the organism as a fundamental explanatory concept. There are three major causes: (a) the realization that the Modern Synthesis does not provide a fully satisfactory understanding of evolution; (b) the growing awareness of the limits of (...)
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  • From DNA- to NA-centrism and the conditions for gene-centrism revisited.Alexis De Tiège, Koen Tanghe, Johan Braeckman & Yves Van de Peer - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (1):55-69.
    First the ‘Weismann barrier’ and later on Francis Crick’s ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology nourished the gene-centric paradigm of life, i.e., the conception of the gene/genome as a ‘central source’ from which hereditary specificity unidirectionally flows or radiates into cellular biochemistry and development. Today, due to advances in molecular genetics and epigenetics, such as the discovery of complex post-genomic and epigenetic processes in which genes are causally integrated, many theorists argue that a gene-centric conception of the organism has become problematic. (...)
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  • Varieties of parity.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (6):903-918.
    A central idea of developmental systems theory is ‘parity’ or ‘symmetry’ between genes and non-genetic factors of development. The precise content of this idea remains controversial, with different authors stressing different aspects and little explicit comparisons among the various interpretations. Here I characterise and assess several influential versions of parity.
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  • Proteins, the chaperone function and heredity.Valeria Mosini - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (1):53-74.
    In this paper I use a case study—the discovery of the chaperon function exerted by proteins in the various steps of the hereditary process—to re-discuss the question whether the nucleic acids are the sole repositories of relevant information as assumed in the information theory of heredity. The evidence I here present of a crucial role for molecular chaperones in the folding of nascent proteins, as well as in DNA duplication, RNA folding and gene control, suggests that the family of proteins (...)
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  • Voles, vasopressin, and infidelity: a molecular basis for monogamy, a platform for ethics, and more?Daniel J. McKaughan - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (4):521-543.
    Voles are attracting attention because genetic variation at a single locus appears to have a profound impact on a complex social behavior, namely monogamy. After briefly reviewing the state of the most relevant scientific literature, I examine the way that this research gets taken up by the popular media, by scientists, and by the notable philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland and interpreted as having deeply revisionary implications for how we ordinarily understand ourselves as persons. We have all these big questions (...)
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  • (1 other version)Biological Atomism and Cell Theory.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (3):202-211.
    Biological atomism postulates that all life is composed of elementary and indivisible vital units. The activity of a living organism is thus conceived as the result of the activities and interactions of its elementary constituents, each of which individually already exhibits all the attributes proper to life. This paper surveys some of the key episodes in the history of biological atomism, and situates cell theory within this tradition. The atomistic foundations of cell theory are subsequently dissected and discussed, together with (...)
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  • Collectivity in Context: Modularity, Cell Sociology, and the Neural Crest.Gillian Gass & Brian K. Hall - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (4):349-359.
    Modularity has become a central and remarkably useful concept in evolutionary developmental biology, offering an explanation of how independent, interacting units make possible developmental events and evolutionary changes. These modules exist at several different levels of organization, from genes to signal transduction pathways to cell populations. Cell populations, which are multicellular modules, provide an opportunity both to clarify our notion of modularity and to reexamine such central concepts as cell-to-cell communication. Rosine Chandebois’s work on “cell sociology” is reframed in the (...)
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  • Ins and outs of systems biology vis-à-vis molecular biology: Continuation or clear cut?Philippe De Backer, Danny De Waele & Linda Van Speybroeck - 2009 - Acta Biotheoretica 58 (1):15-49.
    The comprehension of living organisms in all their complexity poses a major challenge to the biological sciences. Recently, systems biology has been proposed as a new candidate in the development of such a comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to address what systems biology is and how it is practised. To this end, the basic tools of a systems biological approach are explored and illustrated. In addition, it is questioned whether systems biology ‘revolutionizes’ molecular biology and ‘transcends’ its (...)
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  • Gene names as proper names of individuals: An assessment.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2):409-432.
    According to a recent suggestion, the names of gene taxa should be conceived of as referring to individuals with concrete genes as their parts, just as the names of biological species are often understood as denoting individuals with organisms as their parts. Although prima facie this suggestion might advance the debate on gene concepts in a similar way as the species-are-individuals thesis advanced the debate on species concepts, I argue that the principal arguments in support of the gene-individuality thesis are (...)
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  • The issue of life: Aristotle in nursing perspective.Ingunn Elstad - 2009 - Nursing Philosophy 10 (4):275-286.
    This paper explores the issue of life and its relevance to nursing, through Aristotle's philosophy and an Aristotelian interpretation of Nightingale's Notes on Nursing. Life as process and becoming has ontological status in Aristotle's philosophy and this dynamism is particularly relevant for nursing. The paper presents aspects of Aristotle's philosophy of life: his account of life as inherent powers of the individual, his analysis of change and time, and his understanding of sickness and health as qualitative states of living beings. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Invisible genomes: The genomics revolution and patenting practice.Adam Bostanci & Jane Calvert - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (1):109-119.
    In the mid-1990s, the company Human Genome Sciences submitted three potentially revolutionary patent applications to the US Patent and Trademark Office, each of which claimed the entire genome sequence of a microorganism. The patent examiners, however, objected to these applications, and after negotiation they were eventually re-written to resemble more traditional gene patents. In this paper, which is based on a study of the patent examination files, we examine the reasons why these patent applications were unsuccessful in their original form. (...)
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  • Espousing interactions and Fielding reactions: Addressing laypeople's beliefs about genetic determinism.David S. Moore - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (3):331 – 348.
    Although biologists and philosophers of science generally agree that genes cannot determine the forms of biological and psychological traits, students, journalists, politicians, and other members of the general public nonetheless continue to embrace genetic determinism. This article identifies some of the concerns typically raised by individuals when they first encounter the systems perspective that biologists and philosophers of science now favor over genetic determinism, and uses arguments informed by that perspective to address those concerns. No definitive statements can yet be (...)
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  • Biohumanities: Rethinking the relationship between biosciences, philosophy and history of science, and society.Karola Stotz & Paul E. Griffiths - 2007 - Quarterly Review of Biology 83 (1):37--45.
    We argue that philosophical and historical research can constitute a ‘Biohumanities’ which deepens our understanding of biology itself; engages in constructive 'science criticism'; helps formulate new 'visions of biology'; and facilitates 'critical science communication'. We illustrate these ideas with two recent 'experimental philosophy' studies of the concept of the gene and of the concept of innateness conducted by ourselves and collaborators.
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  • The connectionist framework for Gene regulation.Roger Sansom - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (4):475-491.
    I show that gene regulation networks are qualitatively consistent and therefore sufficiently similar to linearly seperable connectionist networks to warrant that the connectionist framework be applied to gene regulation. On this view, natural selection designs gene regulation networks to overcome the difficulty of development. I offer some general lessons about their evolvability that can be learned by examining the generic features of connectionist networks.
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  • The question of questions: What is a Gene? Comments on Rolston and Griffths & Stotz. [REVIEW]Lenny Moss - 2006 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (6):523-534.
    If the question ``What is a gene?'' proves to be worth asking it must be able to elicit an answer which both recognizes and address the reasons why the concept of the gene ever seemed to be something worth getting excited about in the first place as well analyzing and evaluating the latest develops in the molecular biology of DNA. Each of the preceding papers fails to do one of these and sufferrs the consequences. Where Rolston responds to the apparent (...)
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  • When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds.Robert A. Wilson, Matthew J. Barker & Ingo Brigandt - 2007 - Philosophical Topics 35 (1-2):189-215.
    Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...)
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  • Recent work on individualism in the social, behavioural, and biological sciences.Robert A. Wilson - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (3):397-423.
    The social, behavioral, and a good chunk of the biological sciences concern the nature of individual agency, where our paradigm for an individual is a human being. Theories of economic behavior, of mental function and dysfunction, and of ontogenetic development, for example, are theories of how such individuals act, and of what internal and external factors are determinative of that action. Such theories construe individuals in distinctive ways.
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  • Revisiting D.W. Smithers’s “Cancer: An Attack on Cytologism” (1962).Ana M. Soto & Carlos Sonnenschein - 2020 - Biological Theory 15 (4):180-187.
    David Waldron Smithers was, among other things, a physician and a pioneer of cancer radiotherapy and a well-respected figure in British medicine and public health. From the 1940s until his retirement from medical practice in 1973, he was the director of the Radiotherapy Department at the Royal Marsden Hospital and London University Chair of Radiotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research. Using massive amounts of clinical observations, which he interpreted from an organicist viewpoint, and his impressive synthetic thinking, he proposed (...)
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  • Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences.Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre & Marc Silberstein (eds.) - 2014 - Springer.
    The Darwinian theory of evolution is itself evolving and this book presents the details of the core of modern Darwinism and its latest developmental directions. The authors present current scientific work addressing theoretical problems and challenges in four sections, beginning with the concepts of evolution theory, its processes of variation, heredity, selection, adaptation and function, and its patterns of character, species, descent and life. The second part of this book scrutinizes Darwinism in the philosophy of science and its usefulness in (...)
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  • Thomas Hunt Morgan and the invisible gene: the right tool for the job.Giulia Frezza & Mauro Capocci - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (2):31.
    The paper analyzes the early theory building process of Thomas Hunt Morgan from the 1910s to the 1930s and the introduction of the invisible gene as a main explanatory unit of heredity. Morgan’s work marks the transition between two different styles of thought. In the early 1900s, he shifted from an embryological study of the development of the organism to a study of the mechanism of genetic inheritance and gene action. According to his contemporaries as well as to historiography, Morgan (...)
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  • Essentialism, Vitalism, and the GMO Debate.Veronika Szántó - 2018 - Philosophy and Technology 31 (2):189-208.
    There has been a long-standing opposition to genetically modified organisms worldwide. Some studies have tried to identify the deep-lying philosophical, conceptual as well as psychological motivations for this opposition. Philosophical essentialism, psychological essentialism, and vitalism have been proposed as possible candidates. I approach the plausibility of the claim that these notions are related to GMO opposition from a historical perspective. Vitalism and philosophical essentialism have been associated with anti-GMO stance on account of their purported hostility to species and organismic mutability. (...)
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  • The social brain meets the reactive genome: neuroscience, epigenetics and the new social biology.Maurizio Meloni - 2014 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8.
    The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent (...)
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  • Reductionism and its heuristics: Making methodological reductionism honest.William C. Wimsatt - 2006 - Synthese 151 (3):445-475.
    Methodological reductionists practice ‘wannabe reductionism’. They claim that one should pursue reductionism, but never propose how. I integrate two strains in prior work to do so. Three kinds of activities are pursued as “reductionist”. “Successional reduction” and inter-level mechanistic explanation are legitimate and powerful strategies. Eliminativism is generally ill-conceived. Specific problem-solving heuristics for constructing inter-level mechanistic explanations show why and when they can provide powerful and fruitful tools and insights, but sometimes lead to erroneous results. I show how traditional metaphysical (...)
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  • The Meanings of the Gene and the Future of the Phenotype.Lenny Moss - 2008 - Genomics, Society and Policy 4 (1):1-20.
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  • Toolbox murders: putting genes in their epigenetic and ecological contexts: P. Griffiths and K. Stotz: Genetics and philosophy: an introduction. [REVIEW]Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (1):125-142.
    Griffiths and Stotz’s Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction offers a very good overview of scientific and philosophical issues raised by present-day genetics. Examining, in particular, the questions of how a “gene” should be defined and what a gene does from a causal point of view, the authors explore the different domains of the life sciences in which genetics has come to play a decisive role, from Mendelian genetics to molecular genetics, behavioural genetics, and evolution. In this review, I highlight what (...)
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  • International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching.Michael R. Matthews (ed.) - 2014 - Springer.
    This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...)
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  • The somatic mutation theory of cancer: growing problems with the paradigm?Ana M. Soto & Carlos Sonnenschein - 2004 - Bioessays 26 (10):1097-1107.
    The somatic mutation theory has been the prevailing paradigm in cancer research for the last 50 years. Its premises are: (1) cancer is derived from a single somatic cell that has accumulated multiple DNA mutations, (2) the default state of cell proliferation in metazoa is quiescence, and (3) cancer is a disease of cell proliferation caused by mutations in genes that control proliferation and the cell cycle. From this compelling simplicity, an increasingly complicated picture has emerged as more than 100 (...)
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  • Redundancy, Plasticity, and Detachment: The Implications of Comparative Genomics for Evolutionary Thinking.Lenny Moss - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):930-946.
    Radically new or unexpected findings in a science demand an openness to new concepts and styles of explanation. The time is more than ripe for asking ourselves what we have learned from the research program of comparative genomics. Where not long ago the human genome was expected to reveal a close association of complexity with the quantitative expansion of the roster of unique genes, more recent findings, especially in relation to comparisons between human and chimp, have raised the bracing possibility (...)
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  • What's the Fuss about social constructivism.John Dupré - 2004 - Episteme 1 (1):73-85.
    The topic of this paper is social constructivist doctrines about the nature of scientific knowledge. I don't propose to review all the many accounts that have either claimed this designation or had it ascribed to them. Rather I shall try to consider in a very general way what sense should be made of the underlying idea, and then illustrate some of the central points with two central examples from biology. The first thing to say is that, on the face of (...)
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  • DNA codes and information: Formal structures and relational causes.Richard V. Sternberg - 2008 - Acta Biotheoretica 56 (3):205-232.
    Recently the terms “codes” and “information” as used in the context of molecular biology have been the subject of much discussion. Here I propose that a variety of structural realism can assist us in rethinking the concepts of DNA codes and information apart from semantic criteria. Using the genetic code as a theoretical backdrop, a necessary distinction is made between codes qua symbolic representations and information qua structure that accords with data. Structural attractors are also shown to be entailed by (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy of science.Paul E. Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (3):507–521.
    Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitions about possible cases. It also contributes to the study of conceptual change in science, which (...)
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  • Representation in the genome and in other inheritance systems.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (3):313-331.
    There is ongoing controversy as to whether the genome is a representing system. Although it is widely recognised that DNA carries information, both correlating with and coding for various outcomes, neither of these implies that the genome has semantic properties like correctness or satisfaction conditions, In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Sciences, Vol. II. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 387–400). Here a modified version of teleosemantics is applied to the genome to show that it does indeed have semantic (...)
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  • Genes in the postgenomic era.Paul E. Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2006 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (6):499-521.
    We outline three very different concepts of the gene—instrumental, nominal, and postgenomic. The instrumental gene has a critical role in the construction and interpretation of experiments in which the relationship between genotype and phenotype is explored via hybridization between organisms or directly between nucleic acid molecules. It also plays an important theoretical role in the foundations of disciplines such as quantitative genetics and population genetics. The nominal gene is a critical practical tool, allowing stable communication between bioscientists in a wide (...)
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  • Rational animals: What the bravest lion won't risk.Ronald de Sousa - 2004 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (12):365-386.
    I begin with a rather unpromising dispute that Nozick once had with Ian Hacking in the pages of the London Review of Books, in which both vied with one another in their enthusiasm to repudiate the thesis that some human people or peoples are closer than others to animality. I shall attempt to show that one can build, on the basis of Nozick’s discussion of rationality, a defense of the view that the capacity tor language places human rationality out of (...)
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  • Mendel on Developmental Information.Yafeng Shan - 2021 - In Chris Meyns (ed.), Information and the History of Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 262-280.
    It has been widely received that one of Gregor Mendel’s most important contributions to the history of genetics is his novel work on developmental information (for example, the proposal of the famous Mendelian ratios like 1:2:1, 3:1, and 9:3:3:1). This view is well evidenced by the fact that much of early Mendelians’ work in the 1900s focuses on the retrodiction (viz. the re-analysis of the pre-exist data with Mendel’s approach). However, there is no consensus on what Mendel meant by development (...)
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