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  1. Why Do Irrational Beliefs Mimic Science? The Cultural Evolution of Pseudoscience.Stefaan Blancke, Maarten Boudry & Massimo Pigliucci - 2016 - Theoria 82 (4):78-97.
    Why do irrational beliefs adopt the trappings of science, to become what is known as “pseudoscience”? Here, we develop and extend an epidemiological framework to map the factors that explain the form and the popularity of irrational beliefs in scientific garb. These factors include the exploitation of epistemic vigilance, the misunderstanding of the authority of science, the use of the honorific title of “science” as an explicit argument for belief, and the phenomenon of epistemic negligence. We conclude by integrating the (...)
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  • The mismeasure of machine: Synthetic biology and the trouble with engineering metaphors.Maarten Boudry & Massimo Pigliucci - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):660-668.
    The scientific study of living organisms is permeated by machine and design metaphors. Genes are thought of as the ‘‘blueprint’’ of an organism, organisms are ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to discover their functionality, and living cells are compared to biochemical factories, complete with assembly lines, transport systems, messenger circuits, etc. Although the notion of design is indispensable to think about adaptations, and engineering analogies have considerable heuristic value (e.g., optimality assumptions), we argue they are limited in several important respects. In particular, the (...)
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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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  • Circles of Care for Safety: A Care Ethics Approach to Safe-by-Design.Lieke Baas, Suzanne Metselaar & Pim Klaassen - 2022 - NanoEthics 16 (2):167-179.
    Safe-by-Design is an approach to engineering that aims to integrate the value of safety in the design and development of new technologies. It does so by integrating knowledge of potential dangers in the design process and developing methods to design undesirable effects out of the innovation. Recent discussions have highlighted several challenges in conceptualizing safety and integrating the value into the design process. Therefore, some have argued to design for the _responsibility_ for safety, instead of for safety itself. However, this (...)
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  • Metabolism Instead of Machine: Towards an Ontology of Hybrids.Julia Rijssenbeek, Vincent Blok & Zoë Robaey - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (3):1-23.
    The emerging field of synthetic biology aims to engineer novel biological entities. The envisioned future bio-based economy builds largely on “cell factories”: organisms that have been metabolically engineered to sustainably produce substances for human ends. In this paper, we argue that synthetic biology’s goal of creating efficient production vessels for industrial applications implies a set of ontological assumptions according to which living organisms are machines. Traditionally, a machine is understood as a technological, isolated and controllable production unit consisting of parts. (...)
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  • Science and common sense: perspectives from philosophy and science education.Sara Green - 2019 - Synthese 196 (3):795-818.
    This paper explores the relation between scientific knowledge and common sense intuitions as a complement to Hoyningen-Huene’s account of systematicity. On one hand, Hoyningen-Huene embraces continuity between these in his characterization of scientific knowledge as an extension of everyday knowledge, distinguished by an increase in systematicity. On the other, he argues that scientific knowledge often comes to deviate from common sense as science develops. Specifically, he argues that a departure from common sense is a price we may have to pay (...)
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  • Environmental Ethics.Roberta L. Millstein - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer.
    A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...)
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  • Intelligent Design and the Nature of Science: Philosophical and Pedagogical Points.Ingo Brigandt - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), Philosophical Issues in Biology Education. Springer (under contract). pp. 205-238.
    This chapter offers a critique of intelligent design arguments against evolution and a philosophical discussion of the nature of science, drawing several lessons for the teaching of evolution and for science education in general. I discuss why Behe’s irreducible complexity argument fails, and why his portrayal of organismal systems as machines is detrimental to biology education and any under-standing of how organismal evolution is possible. The idea that the evolution of complex organismal features is too unlikely to have occurred by (...)
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  • Do we need a ‘theory’ of development?: Alessandro Minelli and Thomas Pradeu : Towards a Theory of Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, 304 pp, $125 , ISBN 978-0-19-967142-7.Ingo Brigandt - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (4):603-617.
    Edited by Alessandro Minelli and Thomas Pradeu, Towards a Theory of Development gathers essays by biologists and philosophers, which display a diversity of theoretical perspectives. The discussions not only cover the state of art, but broaden our vision of what development includes and provide pointers for future research. Interestingly, all contributors agree that explanations should not just be gene-centered, and virtually none use design and other engineering metaphors to articulate principles of cellular and organismal organization. I comment in particular on (...)
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  • Living Machines: Metaphors We Live By.Nora S. Vaage - 2020 - NanoEthics 14 (1):57-70.
    Within biology and in society, living creatures have long been described using metaphors of machinery and computation: ‘bioengineering’, ‘genes as code’ or ‘biological chassis’. This paper builds on Lakoff and Johnson’s argument that such language mechanisms shape how we understand the world. I argue that the living machines metaphor builds upon a certain perception of life entailing an idea of radical human control of the living world, looking back at the historical preconditions for this metaphor. I discuss how design is (...)
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  • Prediction Promises: Towards a Metaphorology of Artificial Intelligence.Leonie A. Möck - 2023 - Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 9 (2):119-139.
    1. Artificial Intelligence is an ambiguous umbrella term. Until today there is no uniform definition of AI and the term carries several meanings. As exemplary, I will give two definitions of AI tha...
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  • Mind the metaphor! A systematic fallacy in analogical reasoning.Eugen Fischer - 2015 - Analysis 75 (1):67-77.
    Conceptual metaphors facilitate both productive and pernicious analogical reasoning. This article addresses the question: When and why does the frequently helpful use of metaphor become pernicious? By applying the most influential theoretical framework from cognitive psychology in analysing the philosophically most prominent example of pernicious metaphorical reasoning, we identify a philosophically relevant but previously undescribed fallacy in analogical reasoning with metaphors. We then outline an explanation of why even competent thinkers commit this fallacy and obtain a psychologically informed ‘debunking’ explanation (...)
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  • Hybrid Deterministic Views About Genes in Biology Textbooks: A Key Problem in Genetics Teaching.Vanessa Carvalho dos Santos, Leyla Mariane Joaquim & Charbel Niño El-Hani - 2012 - Science & Education 21 (4):543-578.
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  • Engineering and Biology: Counsel for a Continued Relationship.Brett Calcott, Arnon Levy, Mark L. Siegal, Orkun S. Soyer & Andreas Wagner - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (1):50-59.
    Biologists frequently draw on ideas and terminology from engineering. Evolutionary systems biology—with its circuits, switches, and signal processing—is no exception. In parallel with the frequent links drawn between biology and engineering, there is ongoing criticism against this cross-fertilization, using the argument that over-simplistic metaphors from engineering are likely to mislead us as engineering is fundamentally different from biology. In this article, we clarify and reconfigure the link between biology and engineering, presenting it in a more favorable light. We do so (...)
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  • Engineering and evolvability.Brett Calcott - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (3):293-313.
    Comparing engineering to evolution typically involves adaptationist thinking, where well-designed artifacts are likened to well-adapted organisms, and the process of evolution is likened to the process of design. A quite different comparison is made when biologists focus on evolvability instead of adaptationism. Here, the idea is that complex integrated systems, whether evolved or engineered, share universal principles that affect the way they change over time. This shift from adaptationism to evolvability is a significant move for, as I argue, we can (...)
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  • From Ends to Causes (and Back Again) by Metaphor: The Paradox of Natural Selection.Stefaan Blancke, Tammy Schellens, Ronald Soetaert, Hilde Van Keer & Johan Braeckman - 2014 - Science & Education 23 (4):793-808.
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  • Common minds, uncommon thoughts: a philosophical anthropological investigation of uniquely human creative behavior, with an emphasis on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study.Johan De Smedt - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...)
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  • Understanding Biological Mechanisms: Using Illustrations from Circadian Rhythm Research.William Bechtel - unknown
    In many fields of biology, researchers explain a phenomenon by characterizing the responsible mechanism. This requires identifying the candidate mechanism, decomposing it into its parts and operations, recomposing it so as to understand how it is organized and its operations orchestrated to generate the phenomenon, and situating it in its environment. Mechanistic researchers have developed sophisticated tools for decomposing mechanisms but new approaches, including modeling, are increasingly being invoked to recompose mechanisms when they involve nonsequential organization of nonlinear operations. The (...)
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