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Introduction: What is developmental systems theory?

In Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray (eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. MIT Press. pp. 1-11 (2001)

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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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  • Has social constructionism about race outlived its usefulness? Perspectives from a race skeptic.Adam Hochman - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (6):1-20.
    The phrase ‘social constructionism about race’ is so ambiguous that it is unable to convey anything very meaningful. I argue that the various versions of social constructionism about race are either false, overly broad, or better described as anti-realism about biological race. One of the central rhetorical purposes of social constructionism about race has been to serve as an alternative to biological racial realism. However, most versions of social constructionism about race are compatible with biological racial realism, and there are (...)
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  • An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems.Amanda Corris - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-21.
    Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecological niche. These interactions continuously shape both systems in a reciprocal manner, resulting in the emergence of reliably co-occurring configurations within and between both systems. The enactive approach to cognition describes this relationship as the structural coupling between an organism and its environment; similarly, Developmental Systems Theory emphasizes the reciprocal (...)
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  • The proximate-ultimate distinction and the active role of the organism in evolution.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Grant Ramsey - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-20.
    The validity and utility of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology have recently been under debate. Opponents of the distinction argue that it rules out individual-level organismic processes from evolutionary explanations, thereby leading to an unfounded separation between organismic causation and evolutionary causation. Proponents of the proximate-ultimate distinction, on the other hand, argue that it serves an important epistemological role in forming different kinds of explanation-seeking questions in biology. In this paper we offer an interpretation the proximate-ultimate distinction not only as (...)
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  • Psychopathic Personalities and Developmental Systems.Hane Htut Maung - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (4):502-528.
    Is psychopathy born or made? Contemporary psychopathy research shows that there is much wrong with this question. It is increasingly accepted that the development of psychopathy is dependent on multiple causal factors interacting with one another. However, there remains the major theoretical challenge of understanding the relations between these multiple causal factors in the developmental process. In this paper, I argue that the conventional picture of gene-environment interactionism does not offer an adequate account of psychopathy development. Instead, I propose that (...)
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  • Parenthood and the Concept of the Biological Tie.Hane Htut Maung - 2021 - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 2 (7):7-19.
    It is widely assumed that there is value in the biological tie between parent and child. An implication of this is that adoption is often considered a less desirable alternative to procreation. This paper offers a philosophical defence of adoptive parenthood as a valuable and authentic form of parenthood. While previous defences have suggested that society’s valorisation of the biological tie is unjustified, I argue herein that the conception of the biological tie that features in the normative discourse on parenthood (...)
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  • Hegel's Philosophy of Biology? A Programmatic Overview.Andrea Gambarotto & Luca Illetterati - 2020 - Hegel Bulletin 41 (3):349-370.
    This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of theHegel Bulletinentirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to (...)
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  • Emergence in Solid State Physics and Biology.George F. R. Ellis - 2020 - Foundations of Physics 50 (10):1098-1139.
    There has been much controversy over weak and strong emergence in physics and biology. As pointed out by Phil Anderson in many papers, the existence of broken symmetries is the key to emergence of properties in much of solid state physics. By carefully distinguishing between different types of symmetry breaking and tracing the relation between broken symmetries at micro and macro scales, I demonstrate that the emergence of the properties of semiconductors is a case of strong emergence. This is due (...)
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  • Three Kinds of Niche Construction.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Grant Ramsey - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (2):351-372.
    Niche construction theory concerns how organisms can change selection pressures by altering the feature–factor relationship between themselves and their environment. These alterations are standardly understood to be brought about through two kinds of organism–environment interaction: perturbative and relocational niche construction. We argue that a reconceptualization is needed on the grounds that if a niche is understood as the feature–factor relationship, then there are three fundamental ways in which organisms can engage in niche construction: constitutive, relational, and external niche construction. We (...)
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  • Were You a Part of Your Mother?Elselijn Kingma - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):609-646.
    Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a part of the gestating organism. This paper proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the containment view is the received view; that it is generally assumed without good reason; and that it needs substantial support if it (...)
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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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  • Diachronic Metaphysical Building Relations: Towards the Metaphysics of Extended Cognition.Michael David Kirchhoff - 2013 - Dissertation, Macquarie University
    In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still (...)
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  • Conceptual Barriers to Progress Within Evolutionary Biology.Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, Marcus W. Feldman & Jeremy Kendal - 2009 - Foundations of Science 14 (3):195-216.
    In spite of its success, Neo-Darwinism is faced with major conceptual barriers to further progress, deriving directly from its metaphysical foundations. Most importantly, neo-Darwinism fails to recognize a fundamental cause of evolutionary change, “niche construction”. This failure restricts the generality of evolutionary theory, and introduces inaccuracies. It also hinders the integration of evolutionary biology with neighbouring disciplines, including ecosystem ecology, developmental biology, and the human sciences. Ecology is forced to become a divided discipline, developmental biology is stubbornly difficult to reconcile (...)
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  • Comparing and Integrating Biological and Cultural Moral Progress.Markus Christen, Darcia Narvaez & Eveline Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1):55-73.
    Moral progress may be a matter of time scale. If intuitive measures of moral progress like the degree of physical violence within a society are taken as empirical markers, then most human societies have experienced moral progress in the last few centuries. However, if the development of the human species is taken as relevant time scale, there is evidence that humanity has experienced a global moral decline compared to a small-band hunter-gatherer baseline that represents a lifestyle presumed to largely account (...)
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  • Social interaction, languaging and the operational conditions for the emergence of observing.Vincenzo Raimondi - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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  • The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine.Jonathan Beever & Nicolae Morar - 2016 - American Journal of Bioethics 16 (2):34-45.
    The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as (...)
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  • Ontological Emergence: How is That Possible? Towards a New Relational Ontology.Gil C. Santos - 2015 - Foundations of Science 20 (4):429-446.
    In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...)
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  • Creating the Umwelt: From Chance to Choice.S. N. Salthe - 2014 - Biosemiotics 7 (3):351-359.
    Individual semiotic systems interpreting their environment are not well understood from the externalist approach typical of the scientific method. Science constructs probabilities describing large populations of systems, not individuals. The Umwelt, as the individually experienced/created aspects of the habitat aspect of its population’s ecological niche, is given an internalist understanding within the framework of the compositional hierarchy. Vagueness is an important aspect of the internalist condition. It is selectively reduced momentarily by creative choices that can have a Peircean semiotic formulation, (...)
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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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  • Rethinking Woodger’s Legacy in the Philosophy of Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson & Richard Gawne - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (2):243-292.
    The writings of Joseph Henry Woodger (1894–1981) are often taken to exemplify everything that was wrongheaded, misguided, and just plain wrong with early twentieth-century philosophy of biology. Over the years, commentators have said of Woodger: (a) that he was a fervent logical empiricist who tried to impose the explanatory gold standards of physics onto biology, (b) that his philosophical work was completely disconnected from biological science, (c) that he possessed no scientific or philosophical credentials, and (d) that his work was (...)
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  • (1 other version)Moralizing biology: The appeal and limits of the new compassionate view of nature.Maurizio Meloni - 2013 - History of the Human Sciences 26 (3):82-106.
    In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the present transformation of biology and evolution into direct sources of moral phenomena, a process here named (...)
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  • The Boundaries of Development.Thomas Pradeu, Lucie Laplane, Michel Morange, Antonine Nicoglou & Michel Vervoort - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (1):1 - 3.
    This special issue of Biological Theory is focused on development; it raises the problem of the temporal and spatial boundaries of development. From a temporal point of view, when does development start and stop? From a spatial point of view, what is it exactly that "develops", and is it possible to delineate clearly the developing entity? This issue explores the possible answers to these questions, and thus sheds light on the definition of development itself.
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  • The phylogeny fallacy and the ontogeny fallacy.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (4):593-612.
    In 1990 Robert Lickliter and Thomas Berry identified the phylogeny fallacy, an empirically untenable dichotomy between proximate and evolutionary causation, which locates proximate causes in the decoding of ‘ genetic programs’, and evolutionary causes in the historical events that shaped these programs. More recently, Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt argued that Evolutionary Psychologists commit this fallacy, and they proposed an alternative research program for evolutionary psychology. For these authors the phylogeny fallacy is the proximate/evolutionary distinction itself, which they argue constitutes a (...)
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  • There and back again, or the problem of locality in biodiversity surveys.Ayelet Shavit & James Griesemer - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (3):273-294.
    We argue that ‘locality’, perhaps the most mundane term in ecology, holds a basic ambiguity: two concepts of space—nomothetic and idiographic—which are both necessary for a rigorous resurvey to “the same” locality in the field, are committed to different practices with no common measurement. A case study unfolds the failure of the standard assumption that an exogenous grid of longitude and latitude, as fine‐grained as one wishes, suffices for revisiting a species locality. We briefly suggest a scale‐dependent “resolution” for this (...)
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  • Clades Are Reproducers.Andrew Hamilton & Matthew H. Haber - 2006 - Biological Theory 1 (4):381-391.
    Exploring whether clades can reproduce leads to new perspectives on general accounts of biological development and individuation. Here we apply James Griesemer's general account of reproduction to clades. Griesemer's account of reproduction includes a requirement for development, raising the question of whether clades may bemeaningfully said to develop. We offer two illustrative examples of what clade development might look like, though evaluating these examples proves difficult due to the paucity of general accounts of development. This difficulty, however, is instructive about (...)
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  • (1 other version)Using false models to elaborate constraints on processes: Blending inheritance in organic and cultural evolution.William C. Wimsatt - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (S3):S12-S24.
    Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin’s “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing (...)
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  • The ingredients for a postgenomic synthesis of nature and nurture.Karola Stotz - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (3):359 – 381.
    This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue on “Reconciling Nature and Nurture in Behavior and Cognition Research” and sets its agenda to resolve the 'interactionist' dichotomy of nature as the genetic, and stable, factors of development, and nurture as the environmental, and plastic influences. In contrast to this received view it promotes the idea that all traits, no matter how developmentally fixed or universal they seem, contingently develop out of a single-cell state through the interaction of a (...)
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  • The Structure of Explanations and Counter-Explanations of Homosexuality.Fabrizzio Mc Manus - 2012 - Open Journal of Philosophy 2 (4):235-243.
    The aim of this paper is to revisit an ongoing controversy within the so called “Science Wars”; more specifically, I will address a particular topic within the “human nature” debate: the ontological and epistemological status of homosexuality. I claim that, in this particular chapter of the “Science Wars”, we are continually left in an explanatory impasse even when more data are collected, more rigorous experimental techniques are developed, more subtle arguments are offered and more pluralistic narratives are told. My diagnosis (...)
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  • Adaptation, plasticity, and massive modularity in evolutionary psychology: An eassy on David Buller's adapting minds.Stuart Silvers - 2007 - Philosophical Psychology 20 (6):793 – 813.
    Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature DAVID BULLER Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 564 pages, ISBN: 0262025795 (hbk); $37.00.
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  • The Explanatory Role of Umwelt in Evolutionary Theory: Introducing von Baer's Reflections on Teleological Development.Tiago Rama - 2024 - Biosemiotics 1:1-26.
    Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...)
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  • A philosophical analysis of the emergence of language.Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi & Antonio Benítez-Burraco - 2024 - Theoria 90 (1):30-55.
    There is a research programme in linguistics that is founded on describing language as an emergent phenomenon. This paper clarifies how the core concept of emergence is deployed in this emergentist programme. We show that if one adopts the weak understandings of the concept of language emergence, the emergentist programme is not fundamentally different from the other non-emergentist research programmes in linguistics. On the other hand, if one adopts the stronger understandings of emergence then the programme would have a unique (...)
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  • Development and microbiology.Aja Watkins - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (4):1-30.
    On the basis of findings from developmental biology, some researchers have argued that evolutionary theory needs to be significantly updated. Advocates of such a “developmental update” have, among other things, suggested that we need to re-conceptualize units of selection, that we should expand our view of inheritance to include environmental as well as genetic and epigenetic factors, that we should think of organisms and their environment as involved in reciprocal causation, and that we should reevaluate the rates of evolutionary change. (...)
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  • Hierarchy, determinism, and specificity in theories of development and evolution.Ute Deichmann - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (4):33.
    The concepts of hierarchical organization, genetic determinism and biological specificity have played a crucial role in biology as a modern experimental science since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The idea of genetic information and genetic determination was at the basis of molecular biology that developed in the 1940s with macromolecules, viruses and prokaryotes as major objects of research often labelled “reductionist”. However, the concepts have been marginalized or rejected in some of the research that in the late 1960s began (...)
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  • Hierarchy, determinism, and specificity in theories of development and evolution.Ute Diechmann - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (4):33.
    The concepts of hierarchical organization, genetic determinism and biological specificity have played a crucial role in biology as a modern experimental science since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The idea of genetic information and genetic determination was at the basis of molecular biology that developed in the 1940s with macromolecules, viruses and prokaryotes as major objects of research often labelled “reductionist”. However, the concepts have been marginalized or rejected in some of the research that in the late 1960s began (...)
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  • The Productive Power of Ambiguity: Rethinking Homosexuality through the Virtual and Developmental Systems Theory.Ann Burlein - 2005 - Hypatia 20 (1):21-53.
    This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.
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  • Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.P. A. Ryan, S. T. Powers & R. A. Watson - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (1):59-79.
    Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...)
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  • Authentic Crows: Identity, Captivity and Emergent Forms of Life.Thom van Dooren - 2016 - Theory, Culture and Society 33 (2):29-52.
    For over a decade the Hawaiian crow, or ‘alalā, has been extinct in the wild, the only remaining birds living their lives in captivity. As the time for possible release approaches, questions of species identity – in particular focused on how birds have been changed by captivity – have become increasingly pressing. This article explores how identity is imagined and managed in this programme to produce ‘authentic’ crows. In particular, it asks what possibilities might be opened up by a move (...)
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  • Fundamental issues in systems biology.Maureen A. O'Malley & John Dupré - 2005 - Bioessays 27 (12):1270-1276.
    In the context of scientists' reflections on genomics, we examine some fundamental issues in the emerging postgenomic discipline of systems biology. Systems biology is best understood as consisting of two streams. One, which we shall call ‘pragmatic systems biology’, emphasises large‐scale molecular interactions; the other, which we shall refer to as ‘systems‐theoretic biology’, emphasises system principles. Both are committed to mathematical modelling, and both lack a clear account of what biological systems are. We discuss the underlying issues in identifying systems (...)
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  • Functions and fixed types: Biological and other functions in the post-adaptationist era.Ulrich Krohs - 2011 - Applied ontology 6 (2):125-139.
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  • More on how and why: a response to commentaries.Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt & Tobias Uller - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):793-810.
    We are grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our article. Too many interesting and important points have been raised for us to tackle them all in this response, and so in the below we have sought to draw out the major themes. These include problems with both the term ‘ultimate causation’ and the proximate-ultimate causation dichotomy more generally, clarification of the meaning of reciprocal causation, discussion of issues related to the nature of development and phenotypic (...)
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  • The Varieties of Molecular Explanation.Marco J. Nathan - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (2):233-254.
    Reductionists in biology claim that all biological events can be explained in terms of genes and macromolecules alone, while antireductionists argue that some biological events must be explained at a higher level. The literature, however, does not distinguish between different kinds of molecular explanation. The goal of this article is to identify and analyze three such kinds. The analysis of molecular explanations herein carries an important philosophical implication; in shunning crude reductionism and extreme versions of holism, we can combine the (...)
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  • Fine-tuning nativism: the 'nurtured nature' and innate cognitive structures.Slobodan Perovic & Ljiljana Radenovic - 2011 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (3):399-417.
    S. Oyama’s prominent account of the Parity Thesis states that one cannot distinguish in a meaningful way between nature-based (i.e. gene-based) and nurture-based (i.e. environment-based) characteristics in development because the information necessary for the resulting characteristics is contained at both levels. Oyama as well as P. E. Griffiths and K. Stotz argue that the Parity Thesis has far-reaching implications for developmental psychology in that both nativist and interactionist developmental accounts of psychological capacities that presuppose a substantial nature/nurture dichotomy are inadequate. (...)
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  • Fitness “kinematics”: biological function, altruism, and organism–environment development.Marshall Abrams - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (4):487-504.
    It’s recently been argued that biological fitness can’t change over the course of an organism’s life as a result of organisms’ behaviors. However, some characterizations of biological function and biological altruism tacitly or explicitly assume that an effect of a trait can change an organism’s fitness. In the first part of the paper, I explain that the core idea of changing fitness can be understood in terms of conditional probabilities defined over sequences of events in an organism’s life. The result (...)
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  • Extended evolutionary theory makes human culture more amenable to evolutionary analysis.Alex Mesoudi - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (4):374-374.
    Jablonka & Lamb's (J&L's) extended evolutionary theory is more amenable to being applied to human cultural change than standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. However, the authors are too quick to dismiss past evolutionary approaches to human culture. They also overlook a potential parallel between evolved genetic mechanisms that enhance evolvability and learned cognitive mechanisms that enhance learnability.
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  • The poverty of taxonomic characters.Olivier Rieppel & Maureen Kearney - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (1):95-113.
    The theory and practice of contemporary comparative biology and phylogeny reconstruction (systematics) emphasizes algorithmic aspects but neglects a concern for the evidence. The character data used in systematics to formulate hypotheses of relationships in many ways constitute a black box, subject to uncritical assessment and social influence. Concerned that such a state of affairs leaves systematics and the phylogenetic theories it generates severely underdetermined, we investigate the nature of the criteria of homology and their application to character conceptualization in the (...)
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  • Affordances and organizational functions.Manuel Heras-Escribano & Cristian Saborido - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (1):1-16.
    In this paper, we bring together the concepts of affordance from ecological psychology and function from the organizational approach to philosophy of biology into a single integrative framework. This integration allows us to account for the biological basis of the notion of affordance, offering theoretical tools to address the normative interrelations between organisms and their environments.
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  • Natural selection according to Darwin: cause or effect?Ben Bradley - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (2):1-26.
    In the 1940s, the ‘modern synthesis’ (MS) of Darwinism and genetics cast genetic mutation and recombination as the source of variability from which environmental events naturally select the fittest, such ‘natural selection’ constituting the cause of evolution. Recent biology increasingly challenges this view by casting genes as followers and awarding the leading role in the genesis of adaptations to the agency and plasticity of developing phenotypes—making natural selection a consequence of other causal processes. Both views of natural selection claim to (...)
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  • What is Causal Specificity About, and What is it Good for in Philosophy of Biology?María Ferreira Ruiz - 2021 - Acta Biotheoretica 69 (4):821-839.
    The concept of causal specificity is drawing considerable attention from philosophers of biology. It became the rationale for rejecting (and occasionally, accepting) a thesis of causal parity of developmental factors. This literature assumes that attributing specificity to causal relations is at least in principle a straightforward (if not systematic) task. However, the parity debate in philosophy of biology seems to be stuck at a point where it is not the biological details that will help move forward. In this paper, I (...)
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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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  • Niche Construction and Conceptual Change in Evolutionary Biology.Tobias Uller & Heikki Helanterä - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (2):351-375.
    The theoretical status of ‘niche construction’ in evolution is intensely debated. Here we substantiate the reasons for different interpretations. We consider two concepts of niche construction brought to bear on evolutionary theory; one that emphasizes how niche construction contributes to selection and another that emphasizes how it contributes to development and inheritance. We explain the rationale for claims that selective and developmental niche construction motivate conceptual change in evolutionary biology and the logic of those who reject these claims. Our analysis (...)
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