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  1. A conceptual taxonomy of adaptation in evolutionary biology.Emanuele Serrelli & Francesca Micol Rossi - manuscript
    The concept of adaptation is employed in many fields such as biology, psychology, cognitive sciences, robotics, social sciences, even literacy and art,1 and its meaning varies quite evidently according to the particular research context in which it is applied. We expect to find a particularly rich catalogue of meanings within evolutionary biology, where adaptation has held a particularly central role since Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) throughout important epistemological shifts and scientific findings that enriched and diversified the concept. Accordingly, (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Historical Transformation of Individual Concepts into Populational Ones: An Explanatory Shift in the Gestation of the Modern Synthesis.Tiago Rama - manuscript
    In this paper, I will conduct three interrelated analyses. First, I will develop an analysis of various concepts in the history of biology that used to refer to individual-level phenomena but were then reinterpreted by the Modern Synthesis in terms of populations. Second, I argue that a similar situation can be found in contemporary biological theory. While different approaches reflect on the causal role of developing organisms in evolution, proponents of the Modern Synthesis avoid any substantial change by reinterpreting and (...)
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  • Cognitive Twists: The Coevolution of Learning and Genes in Human Cognition.Antonella Tramacere & Fabrizio Mafessoni - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (1):189-217.
    In this paper, we propose the expression cognitive twists for cognitive mechanisms that result from the coevolution of genes and learning. Evidence is available that at least some cultural learning mechanisms, such as imitation and language, have evolved genetically under the pressure produced by culture, even though they are mostly acquired through domain-general learning during development. Although the existence of these mechanisms is consistent with evolutionary theory, their importance has not been sufficiently emphasized by mind-centered accounts of human cognitive evolution, (...)
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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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  • Adapting to Environmental Heterogeneity: Selection and Radiation.Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biological Theory 17 (1):80-93.
    Environmental heterogeneity is invoked as a key explanatory factor in the adaptive evolution of a surprisingly wide range of phenomena. This article aims to analyze this explanatory scheme of categorizing traits or properties as adaptations to environmental heterogeneity. First it is suggested that this scheme can be understood as a reaction to how heterogeneity adaptations were discounted or ignored in the modern synthesis. Then a positive account is proposed, distinguishing between two broad categories of adaptation to environmental heterogeneity: properties selected (...)
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  • Underdetermination and Evidence in the Developmental Plasticity Debate.Karen Kovaka - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (1):127-152.
    I identify a controversial hypothesis in evolutionary biology called the plasticity-first hypothesis. I argue that the plasticity-first hypothesis is underdetermined and that the most popular means of studying the plasticity-first hypothesis are insufficient to confirm or disconfirm it. I offer a strategy for overcoming this problem. Researchers need to develop a richer middle range theory of plasticity-first evolution that allows them to identify distinctive empirical traces of the hypothesis. They can then use those traces to discriminate between rival explanations of (...)
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  • Homology across inheritance systems.Russell Powell & Nicholas Shea - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (6):781-806.
    Recent work on inheritance systems can be divided into inclusive conceptions, according to which genetic and non-genetic inheritance are both involved in the development and transmission of nearly all animal behavioral traits, and more demanding conceptions of what it takes for non-genetic resources involved in development to qualify as a distinct inheritance system. It might be thought that, if a more stringent conception is adopted, homologies could not subsist across two distinct inheritance systems. Indeed, it is commonly assumed that homology (...)
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  • On the Genetic and Epigenetic Bases of Primate Signal Processing.Louis J. Goldberg & Leonard A. Rosenblum - 2013 - Biosemiotics 6 (2):161-176.
    Four sequential, sub-processes are identified as the fundamental steps in the processing of signals by big-brained animals. These are, Detection of the signal, its Representation in correlated sensory brain structure, the Interpretation of the signal in another part of the brain and the Expression of the receiver’s response. We label this four-step spatiotemporal process DRIE. We support the view that when the context within which such signals are produced and received is relatively constant, the DRIE process can be ultimately assimilated (...)
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  • Fighting about frequency.Karen Kovaka - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7777-7797.
    Scientific disputes about how often different processes or patterns occur are relative frequency controversies. These controversies occur across the sciences. In some areas—especially biology—they are even the dominant mode of dispute. Yet they depart from the standard picture of what a scientific controversy is like. In fact, standard philosophical accounts of scientific controversies suggest that relative frequency controversies are irrational or lacking in epistemic value. This is because standard philosophical accounts of scientific controversies often assume that in order to be (...)
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  • DNA Dispose, but Subjects Decide. Learning and the Extended Synthesis.Markus Lindholm - 2015 - Biosemiotics 8 (3):443-461.
    Adaptation by means of natural selection depends on the ability of populations to maintain variation in heritable traits. According to the Modern Synthesis this variation is sustained by mutations and genetic drift. Epigenetics, evodevo, niche construction and cultural factors have more recently been shown to contribute to heritable variation, however, leading an increasing number of biologists to call for an extended view of speciation and evolution. An additional common feature across the animal kingdom is learning, defined as the ability to (...)
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  • Model organisms in evo-devo: promises and pitfalls of the comparative approach.Alessandro Minelli & Jan Baedke - 2014 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (1):42-59.
    Evolutionary developmental biology is a rapidly growing discipline whose ambition is to address questions that are of relevance to both evolutionary biology and developmental biology. This field has been increasingly progressing as a new and independent comparative science. However, we argue that evo-devo’s comparative approach is challenged by several metaphysical, methodological and socio-disciplinary issues related to the foundation of heuristic functions of model organisms and the possible criteria to be adopted for their selection. In addition, new tools have to be (...)
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  • (1 other version)The sociobiology of genes: the gene’s eye view as a unifying behavioural-ecological framework for biological evolution.Alexis De Tiège, Yves Van de Peer, Johan Braeckman & Koen B. Tanghe - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):1-26.
    Although classical evolutionary theory, i.e., population genetics and the Modern Synthesis, was already implicitly ‘gene-centred’, the organism was, in practice, still generally regarded as the individual unit of which a population is composed. The gene-centred approach to evolution only reached a logical conclusion with the advent of the gene-selectionist or gene’s eye view in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas classical evolutionary theory can only work with (genotypically represented) fitness differences between individual organisms, gene-selectionism is capable of working with fitness differences (...)
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  • Reciprocal causation and biological practice.Caleb Hazelwood - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (1):1-23.
    Arguments for an extended evolutionary synthesis often center on the concept of “reciprocal causation.” Proponents argue that reciprocal causation is superior to standard models of evolutionary causation for at least two reasons. First, it leads to better scientific models with more predictive power. Second, it more accurately represents the causal structure of the biological world. Simply put, proponents of an extended evolutionary synthesis argue that reciprocal causation is empirically and explanatorily apt relative to competing causal frameworks. In this paper, I (...)
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  • The plasticity of ageing and the rediscovery of ground-state prevention.Alessandro Blasimme - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-18.
    In this paper, I present an emerging explanatory framework about ageing and care. In particular, I focus on how, in contrast to most classical accounts of ageing, biomedicine today construes the ageing process as a modifiable trajectory. This framing turns ageing from a stage of inexorable decline into the focus of preventive strategies, harnessing the functional plasticity of the ageing organism. I illustrate this shift by focusing on studies of the demographic dynamics in human population, observations of ageing as an (...)
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  • What the Baldwin Effect affects depends on the nature of plasticity.Thomas J. H. Morgan, Jordan W. Suchow & Thomas L. Griffiths - 2020 - Cognition 197 (C):104165.
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  • The Evolutionary Gene and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.Qiaoying Lu & Pierrick Bourrat - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (3):775-800.
    Advocates of an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ have claimed that standard evolutionary theory fails to accommodate epigenetic inheritance. The opponents of the extended synthesis argue that the evidence for epigenetic inheritance causing adaptive evolution in nature is insufficient. We suggest that the ambiguity surrounding the conception of the gene represents a background semantic issue in the debate. Starting from Haig’s gene-selectionist framework and Griffiths and Neumann-Held’s notion of the evolutionary gene, we define senses of ‘gene’, ‘environment’, and ‘phenotype’ in a way (...)
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  • Preparedness in cultural learning.Cameron Rouse Turner & Lachlan Douglas Walmsley - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):81-100.
    It is clear throughout Cognitive Gadgets Heyes believes the development of cognitive capacities results from the interaction of genes and experience. However, she opposes cognitive instincts theorists to her own view that uniquely human capacities are cognitive gadgets. Instinct theorists believe that cognitive capacities are substantially produced by selection, with the environment playing a triggering role. Heyes’s position is that humans have similar general learning capacities to those present across taxa, and that sophisticated human cognition is substantially created by our (...)
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  • (1 other version)The sociobiology of genes: the gene’s eye view as a unifying behavioural-ecological framework for biological evolution.Alexis De Tiège, Yves Van de Peer, Johan Braeckman & Koen B. Tanghe - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):6.
    Although classical evolutionary theory, i.e., population genetics and the Modern Synthesis, was already implicitly ‘gene-centred’, the organism was, in practice, still generally regarded as the individual unit of which a population is composed. The gene-centred approach to evolution only reached a logical conclusion with the advent of the gene-selectionist or gene’s eye view in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas classical evolutionary theory can only work with fitness differences between individual organisms, gene-selectionism is capable of working with fitness differences among genes (...)
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  • (1 other version)The historical transformation of individual concepts into populational ones: an explanatory shift in the gestation of the modern synthesis.Tiago Rama - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (4):1-26.
    In this paper, I will conduct three interrelated analyses. First, I will develop an analysis of various concepts in the history of biology that used to refer to individual-level phenomena but were then reinterpreted by the Modern Synthesis in terms of populations. Second, a similar situation can be found in contemporary evolutionary theory. While different approaches reflect on the causal role of developing organisms in evolution, proponents of the Modern Synthesis refrain from any substantial change by reinterpreting and explaining individual-level (...)
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  • Cheats as first propagules: A new hypothesis for the evolution of individuality during the transition from single cells to multicellularity.Paul B. Rainey & Benjamin Kerr - 2010 - Bioessays 32 (10):872-880.
    The emergence of individuality during the evolutionary transition from single cells to multicellularity poses a range of problems. A key issue is how variation in lower‐level individuals generates a corporate (collective) entity with Darwinian characteristics. Of central importance to this process is the evolution of a means of collective reproduction, however, the evolution of a means of collective reproduction is not a trivial issue, requiring careful consideration of mechanistic details. Calling upon observations from experiments, we draw attention to proto‐life cycles (...)
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  • A role for genetic accommodation in evolution?Christian Braendle & Thomas Flatt - 2006 - Bioessays 28 (9):868-873.
    Whether evolutionary change can occur by genetic assimilation, or more generally by genetic accommodation, remains controversial. Here we examine some of the experimental evidence for both phenomena. Several experiments in Drosophila suggest that assimilation is possible, and a new paper1 shows that a color polyphenism in the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, can evolve by genetic accommodation. We argue that genetic accommodation, including assimilation, is a plausible mechanism in evolution; however, more work is required to test how this mechanism acts and (...)
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