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The Structure of Biological Science

New York: Cambridge University Press (1985)

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  1. 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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  • Función como concepto teórico.Santiago Ginnobili - 2011 - Scientiae Studia 9 (4):847-880.
    En este artículo, se pretende brindar una nueva perspectiva al respecto de la atribución de funciones en biología. La idea consiste en considerar que los conceptos funcionales son conceptos primitivos de una teoría científica, tal como desarrollada por Darwin en sus textos sobre la fecundación cruzada. Intentaré mostrar que teorías, que hacen ese uso de los conceptos funcionales, tienen características sintomáticas de teorías consideradas habitualmente genuinas y compararé mi enfoque con otros alternativos acerca de las funciones. En la reconstrucción, se (...)
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  • Schaffner’s Model of Theory Reduction: Critique and Reconstruction.Rasmus Gr⊘Nfeldt Winther - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (2):119-142.
    Schaffner’s model of theory reduction has played an important role in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. Here, the model is found to be problematic because of an internal tension. Indeed, standard antireductionist external criticisms concerning reduction functions and laws in biology do not provide a full picture of the limits of Schaffner’s model. However, despite the internal tension, his model usefully highlights the importance of regulative ideals associated with the search for derivational, and embedding, deductive relations among mathematical (...)
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  • (1 other version)Probability.Branden Fitelson, Alan Hajek & Ned Hall - 2005 - In Sahotra Sarkar & Jessica Pfeifer (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge.
    There are two central questions concerning probability. First, what are its formal features? That is a mathematical question, to which there is a standard, widely (though not universally) agreed upon answer. This answer is reviewed in the next section. Second, what sorts of things are probabilities---what, that is, is the subject matter of probability theory? This is a philosophical question, and while the mathematical theory of probability certainly bears on it, the answer must come from elsewhere. To see why, observe (...)
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  • Burying the vehicle.Richard Dawkins - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):616-617.
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  • (1 other version)Towards a model of life and cognition.Nagarjuna G. - forthcoming - In B. V. Srikantan (ed.), Foundations of Science. Center for Studies in Civilizations.
    What should be the ontology of the world such that life and cognition are possible? In this essay, I undertake to outline an alternative ontological foundation which makes biological and cognitive phenomena possible. The foundation is built by defining a model, which is presented in the form of a description of a hypothetical but a logically possible world with a defined ontological base. Biology rests today on quite a few not so well connected foundations: molecular biology based on the genetic (...)
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  • Evolution in thermodynamic perspective: An ecological approach. [REVIEW]Bruce H. Weber, David J. Depew, C. Dyke, Stanley N. Salthe, Eric D. Schneider, Robert E. Ulanowicz & Jeffrey S. Wicken - 1989 - Biology and Philosophy 4 (4):373-405.
    Recognition that biological systems are stabilized far from equilibrium by self-organizing, informed, autocatalytic cycles and structures that dissipate unusable energy and matter has led to recent attempts to reformulate evolutionary theory. We hold that such insights are consistent with the broad development of the Darwinian Tradition and with the concept of natural selection. Biological systems are selected that re not only more efficient than competitors but also enhance the integrity of the web of energetic relations in which they are embedded. (...)
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  • Causal regularities in the biological world of contingent distributions.C. Kenneth Waters - 1998 - Biology and Philosophy 13 (1):5-36.
    Former discussions of biological generalizations have focused on the question of whether there are universal laws of biology. These discussions typically analyzed generalizations out of their investigative and explanatory contexts and concluded that whatever biological generalizations are, they are not universal laws. The aim of this paper is to explain what biological generalizations are by shifting attention towards the contexts in which they are drawn. I argue that within the context of any particular biological explanation or investigation, biologists employ two (...)
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  • The cladistic solution to the species problem.Mark Ridley - 1989 - Biology and Philosophy 4 (1):1-16.
    The correct explanation of why species, in evolutionary theory, are individuals and not classes is the cladistic species concept. The cladistic species concept defines species as the group of organisms between two speciation events, or between one speciation event and one extinction event, or (for living species) that are descended from a speciation event. It is a theoretical concept, and therefore has the virtue of distinguishing clearly the theoretical nature of species from the practical criteria by which species may be (...)
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  • The individuality thesis, essences, and laws of nature.Michael T. Ghiselin - 1988 - Biology and Philosophy 3 (4):467-474.
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  • Causes, proximate and ultimate.Richard C. Francis - 1990 - Biology and Philosophy 5 (4):401-415.
    Within evolutionary biology a distinction is frequently made between proximate and ultimate causes. One apparently plausible interpretation of this dichotomy is that proximate causes concern processes occurring during the life of an organism while ultimate causes refer to those processes (particularly natural selection) that shaped its genome. But ultimate causes are not sought through historical investigations of an organisms lineage. Rather, explanations referring to ultimate causes typically emerge from functional analyses. But these functional analyses do not identify causes of any (...)
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  • Complementarity and the description of nature in biological science.Henry J. Folse - 1990 - Biology and Philosophy 5 (2):211-224.
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  • Species concepts and the ontology of evolution.Joel Cracraft - 1987 - Biology and Philosophy 2 (3):329-346.
    Biologists and philosophers have long recognized the importance of species, yet species concepts serve two masters, evolutionary theory on the one hand and taxonomy on the other. Much of present-day evolutionary and systematic biology has confounded these two roles primarily through use of the biological species concept. Theories require entities that are real, discrete, irreducible, and comparable. Within the neo-Darwinian synthesis, however, biological species have been treated as real or subjectively delimited entities, discrete or nondiscrete, and they are often capable (...)
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  • Evolutionary anti-reductionism: Historical reflections. [REVIEW]John Beatty - 1990 - Biology and Philosophy 5 (2):199-210.
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  • The rebirth of rational morphology.David Resnik - 1994 - Acta Biotheoretica 42 (1):1-14.
    This paper examines a new challenge to neo-Darwinism, a movement known as process structuralism. The process structuralist critique of neo-Darwinism holds 1) that there are general laws in biology and that biologists should search for these laws; 2) that there are general forms of morphology and development and that biologists should attempt to uncover these forms; 3) that organisms are unified wholes that cannot be understood without adopting a holistic perspective; and 4) that no special, causal primacy should be given (...)
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  • The difference between selection and drift: A reply to Millstein. [REVIEW]Robert N. Brandon - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):153-170.
    Millstein [Bio. Philos. 17 (2002) 33] correctly identies a serious problem with the view that natural selection and random drift are not conceptually distinct. She offers a solution to this problem purely in terms of differences between the processes of selection and drift. I show that this solution does not work, that it leaves the vast majority of real biological cases uncategorized. However, I do think there is a solution to the problem she raises, and I offer it here. My (...)
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  • Supervenience and explanation.Harold Kincaid - 1988 - Synthese 77 (November):251-81.
    This paper explores the explanatory adequacy of lower-level theories when their higher-level counterparts are irreducible. If some state or entity described by a high-level theory supervenes upon and is realized in events, entities, etc. described by the relevant lower-level theory, does the latter fully explain the higher-level event even if the higher-level theory is irreducible? While the autonomy of the special sciences and the success of various eliminativist programs depends in large part on how we answer this question, neither the (...)
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  • Causes ultimes et causes prochaines.Martin Flament-Fultot - 2013 - RÉPHA, revue étudiante de philosophie analytique 7:61-76.
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  • Convergent evolution as natural experiment: the tape of life reconsidered.Russell Powell & Carlos Mariscal - 2015 - Interface Focus 5 (6):1-13.
    Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the ‘tape of life’ would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution—the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions—which many interpret as evidence against Gould’s thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural experiments (...)
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  • Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation.Pablo Lorenzano - 2020 - In Lorenzo Baravalle & Luciana Zaterka (eds.), Life and Evolution, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. pp. 163-207.
    Three metascientific concepts that have been object of philosophical analysis are the concepts oflaw, model and theory. The aim ofthis article is to present the explication of these concepts, and of their relationships, made within the framework of Sneedean or Metatheoretical Structuralism (Balzer et al. 1987), and of their application to a case from the realm of biology: Population Dynamics. The analysis carried out will make it possible to support, contrary to what some philosophers of science in general and of (...)
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  • Has classical gene position been practically reduced?Oriol Vidal & David Teira - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-20.
    One of the defining features of the classical gene was its position. In molecular genetics, positions are defined instead as nucleotide numbers and there is no clear correspondence with its classical counterpart. However, the classical gene position did not simply disappear with the development of the molecular approach, but survived in the lab associated to different genetic practices. The survival of classical gene position would illustrate Waters’ view about the practical persistence of the genetic approach beyond reductionism and anti-reductionist claims. (...)
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  • Normativity in the Philosophy of Science.Marie I. Kaiser - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (1-2):36-62.
    This paper analyzes what it means for philosophy of science to be normative. It argues that normativity is a multifaceted phenomenon rather than a general feature that a philosophical theory either has or lacks. It analyzes the normativity of philosophy of science by articulating three ways in which a philosophical theory can be normative. Methodological normativity arises from normative assumptions that philosophers make when they select, interpret, evaluate, and mutually adjust relevant empirical information, on which they base their philosophical theories. (...)
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  • Neither Logical Empiricism nor Vitalism, but Organicism: What the Philosophy of Biology Was.Daniel J. Nicholson & Richard Gawne - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (4):345-381.
    Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as (...)
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  • Typology and Natural Kinds in Evo-Devo.Ingo Brigandt - 2021 - In Nuño De La Rosa Laura & Müller Gerd (eds.), Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Reference Guide. Springer. pp. 483-493.
    The traditional practice of establishing morphological types and investigating morphological organization has found new support from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), especially with respect to the notion of body plans. Despite recurring claims that typology is at odds with evolutionary thinking, evo-devo offers mechanistic explanations of the evolutionary origin, transformation, and evolvability of morphological organization. In parallel, philosophers have developed non-essentialist conceptions of natural kinds that permit kinds to exhibit variation and undergo change. This not only facilitates a construal of species (...)
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  • EXPLICAÇÕES TELEOLÓGICAS E FUNCIONAIS EM LIVROS DIDÁTICOS DE BIOLOGIA DO ENSINO MÉDIO.Ricardo Santos do Carmo - 2010 - Dissertation, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
    Neste trabalho, avaliamos as implicações que o debate filosófico acerca das explicações em termos de função e objetivo podem ter no contexto educacional, particularmente no ensino e aprendizagem de biologia. Para alcançar este objetivo, investigamos como três obras didáticas de biologia do Brasil utilizam a linguagem teleológica na formulação de explicações para os assuntos que são objeto de estudo dessa ciência. Na análise das obras, exploramos os enunciados teleológicos e funcionais a partir de dois projetos explanatórios discutidos na filosofia da (...)
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  • Reduction.Marie I. Kaiser - 2013 - In Dubitzky W., Wolkenhauer O., Cho K.-H. & Yokota H. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Vol. X. Springer. pp. 1827-1830.
    This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on reduction.
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  • Laws and Natural History in Biology.Wim J. Van Der Steen & Harmke Kamminga - 1991 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 42 (4):445-467.
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  • Whence Philosophy of Biology?Jason M. Byron - 2007 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (3):409-422.
    A consensus exists among contemporary philosophers of biology about the history of their field. According to the received view, mainstream philosophy of science in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s focused on physics and general epistemology, neglecting analyses of the 'special sciences', including biology. The subdiscipline of philosophy of biology emerged (and could only have emerged) after the decline of logical positivism in the 1960s and 70s. In this article, I present bibliometric data from four major philosophy of science journals (Erkenntnis, (...)
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  • The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 27-52.
    According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...)
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  • An Ontic Account of Explanatory Reduction in Biology.Marie I. Kaiser - 2012 - Köln: Kölner Hochschulschriften.
    Convincing disputes about explanatory reductionism in the philosophy of biology require a clear and precise understanding of what a reductive explanation in biology is. The central aim of this book is to provide such an account by revealing the features that determine the reductive character of a biological explanation. Chapters I-IV provide the ground, on which I can then, in Chapter V, develop my own account of explanatory reduction in biology: Chapter I reveals the meta-philosophical assumptions that underlie my analysis (...)
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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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  • Dimensions of scientific law.Sandra D. Mitchell - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):242-265.
    Biological knowledge does not fit the image of science that philosophers have developed. Many argue that biology has no laws. Here I criticize standard normative accounts of law and defend an alternative, pragmatic approach. I argue that a multidimensional conceptual framework should replace the standard dichotomous law/ accident distinction in order to display important differences in the kinds of causal structure found in nature and the corresponding scientific representations of those structures. To this end I explore the dimensions of stability, (...)
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  • Optimality and constraint.David A. Helweg & Herbert L. Roitblat - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):222-223.
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  • Types of optimality: Who is the steersman?Michael E. Hyland - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):223-224.
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  • Different vehicles for group selection in humans.Michael E. Hyland - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):628-628.
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  • Hominids, coalitions, and weapons: Not vehicles.Jim Moore - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):632-632.
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  • Nongenetic and non-Darwinian evolution.Anatol Rapoport - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):634-634.
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  • Putting the cart back behind the horse: Group selection does not require that groups be “organisms”.Todd A. Grantham - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):622-623.
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  • The consequences of group selection in a domain without genetic input: Culture.C. Loring Brace - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):611-612.
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  • Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences.David Sloan Wilson & Elliott Sober - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):585-608.
    In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...)
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  • Darwin´s two hundred years: is not time for a change?Armando Aranda-Anzaldo - 2009 - Ludus Vitalis 17 (32):87-99.
    Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth, the evolution of living systems is an accepted fact but there is scope for controversy on the mechanisms involved in such a process. Mainstream neo-Darwinism champions the role of natural selection (NS) as the fundamental cause of the evolutionary process as well as of random, contingent events at the genetic level as the main source of variation upon which NS performs its causal role. Thus, according to neo-Darwinism the course of biological evolution is quite (...)
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  • Who Got What Wrong? Fodor and Piattelli on Darwin: Guiding Principles and Explanatory Models in Natural Selection.José Díez & Pablo Lorenzano - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (5):1143-1175.
    The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...)
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  • Probability in Biology: The Case of Fitness.Roberta L. Millstein - 2016 - In Alan Hájek & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 601-622.
    I argue that the propensity interpretation of fitness, properly understood, not only solves the explanatory circularity problem and the mismatch problem, but can also withstand the Pandora’s box full of problems that have been thrown at it. Fitness is the propensity (i.e., probabilistic ability, based on heritable physical traits) for organisms or types of organisms to survive and reproduce in particular environments and in particular populations for a specified number of generations; if greater than one generation, “reproduction” includes descendants of (...)
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  • Biological Species Are Natural Kinds.Crawford L. Elder - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):339-362.
    This paper argues that typical biological species are natural kinds, on a familiar realist understanding of natural kinds—classes of individuals across which certain properties cluster together, in virtue of the causal workings of the world. But the clustering is far from exceptionless. Virtually no properties, or property-combinations, characterize every last member of a typical species—unless they can also appear outside the species. This motivates some to hold that what ties together the members of a species is the ability to interbreed, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Economics is Too Important to Be Left to the Rhetoricians.Alexander Rosenberg - 1988 - Economics and Philosophy 4 (1):129.
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  • Holism and Reductionism in Biology and Ecology the Mutual Dependence of Higher and Lower Level Research Programmes.Rick C. Looijen - 2000 - Springer.
    Holism and reductionism are usually seen as opposite and mutually exclusive approaches to nature. Recently, some have come to see them as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. In this book I have argued that, even stronger, they should be seen as mutually dependent and co-operating research programmes. I have discussed holism and reductionism in biology in general and in ecology in particular. After an introductory chapter I have provided an overview of holistic and reductionistic positions in biology, and of the (...)
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  • Resurrecting biological essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (3):344-382.
    The article defends the doctrine that Linnaean taxa, including species, have essences that are, at least partly, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. The consensus among philosophers of biology is that such essentialism is deeply wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. I argue that biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behavior of species require structural explanations that must advert to these essential properties. The objection that, according to current “species concepts,” species are relational is rejected. These concepts are primarily concerned with (...)
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  • Réduction «rôle-occupant», réduction «micro-macro» et explication réductrice a priori.Max Kistler - 2005 - Dialogue 44 (2):225-248.
    It has been argued that most truths about macroscopic states of affairs are entailed by a (hypothetical) complete descriptionPof the world in microscopic terms. In principle, micro-reductive explanations of non-microphysical truths could be constructeda priori.Against this claim, I show that reductive explanation requires knowledge about the phenomena to be reduced which cannot bea prioriextracted from microphysical information alone. Such reductions proceed in two steps: a “reductionR0” (“role-occupant”) establishes that a macroproperty M plays a certain causal role (specified in macro-terms), while (...)
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  • The engagement of religion and biology: A case study in the mediating role of metaphor in the sociobiology of Lumsden & Wilson. [REVIEW]Jitse M. van der Meer - 2000 - Biology and Philosophy 15 (5):669-698.
    I claim that explanations of human behaviour by Edward O. Wilsonand Charles Lumsden are constituted by a religiously functioningmetaphysics: emergent materialism. The constitutive effects areidentified using six criteria, beginning with a metaphorical re-description of dissimilarities between levels of organization interms of the lower level, and consist of conceptual andexplanatory reductions (CER). Wilson and Lumsden practice CER,even though CER is not required by emergent materialism. Theypreconceive this practice by a re-description which conflates thelevels of organization and explain failure of CER in (...)
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  • Darwinian metaphysics: Species and the question of essentialism.Samir Okasha - 2002 - Synthese 131 (2):191-213.
    Biologists and philosophers of biology typically regard essentialism about speciesas incompatible with modern Darwinian theory. Analytic metaphysicians such asKripke, Putnam and Wiggins, on the other hand, believe that their essentialist thesesare applicable to biological kinds. I explore this tension. I show that standard anti-essentialist considerations only show that species do not have intrinsic essential properties. I argue that while Putnam and Kripke do make assumptions that contradict received biological opinion, their model of natural kinds, suitably modified, is partially applicable to (...)
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