Climate and evolution represents an important contribution to evolutionary biogeography, that influenced several authors, notably Karl P. Schmidt, George S. Myers, George G. Simpson, Philip J. Darlington, Ernst Mayr, Thomas Barbour, John C. Poynton, Allen Keast, Léon Croizat, Robin Craw, Michael Heads, and Osvaldo A. Reig. Authors belonging to the “New York School of Zoogeography” –a research community including Matthew, Schmidt, Myers and Simpson– accepted Matthew’s “Holarcticism” and the permanence of ocean basins and continents, whereas others, especially panbiogeographers and cladistic (...) biogeographers, were extremely critical and reacted against these ideas. “Holarcticism” has been falsified and rejected by dispersalists and the “New York School of Zoogeography” disappeared in the 1970s. Matthew, however, continues being identified by panbiogeographers and cladistic biogeographers as a key representative of classic dispersalism, helping provide some cohesion to their research communities. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have examined The Theory of Island Biogeography by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson (1967) mainly due to its important contribution to modeling in ecology, but they have not examined it as a representative case of ecological explanation. In this paper, I scrutinize the type of explanation used in this paradigmatic work of ecology. I describe the philosophy of science of MacArthur and Wilson and show that it is mechanistic. Based on this account and in light of (...) contributions to the mechanistic conception of explanation due to Craver (2007), and Bechtel and Richardson (1993), I argue that MacArthur and Wilson use a mechanistic approach to explain the species-area relationship. In light of this examination, I formulate a normative account of mechanistic explanation in ecology. Furthermore, I argue that it offers a basis for methodological unification of ecology and solves a dispute on the nature of ecology. Lastly, I show that proposals for a new paradigm of biogeography appear to maintain the norms of mechanistic explanation implicit in The Theory of Island Biogeography. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue for four related claims. First, Richard Levins’ classic “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology” was a statement and defense of theoretical population biology growing out of collaborations between Robert MacArthur, Richard Lewontin, E. O. Wilson, and others. Second, I argue that the essay served as a response to the rise of systems ecology especially as pioneered by Kenneth Watt. Third, the arguments offered by Levins against systems ecology and in favor of his own (...) methodological program are best construed as “pragmatic”. Fourth, I consider limitations of Levins’ arguments given contemporary population biology. (shrink)

After biologist Deborah Gordon made a series of experimental discoveries in the 1980s, she argued that a change in terminology regarding the division of labor among castes of specialists was needed. Gordon’s investigations of the interactive effects of ants in colonies led her to believe that the established approach Edward O. Wilson had pioneered was biased in a way that made some alternative candidate adaptive explanations invisible. Gordon argued that this was because the term “division of labor” implied a division (...) among specialists that was unwarranted, and proposed “task allocation” as a better description that did not bias research against the alternative causes she had discovered. Gordon’s empirical findings and theoretical proposals also vindicate the initial critics of Wilson’s human sociobiology who have been dismissed as political radicals, but her proposals have been widely misunderstood by many contemporary behavioral ecologists. The terminological and methodological confusions rampant in contemporary discourse can be clarified by applying a framework developed by Elisabeth Lloyd involving an analysis of the constraints imposed by different research questions. Applying this framework will show how the methodological problems involving description raised by the initial critics of Wilson’s human sociobiology extended to his analysis of ants, indicating that they were not challenging Wilson’s naturalistic approach to the study of human evolution, but rather his methods. It will also show how confusion over how Gordon’s proposed research questions have been conflated with the possible answers she has argued ought to be investigated. This in turn will clarify contemporary disputes over her proposal to abandon the term “division of labor.”. (shrink)

The existing literature on the development of recombinant DNA technology and genetic engineering tends to focus on Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer's recombinant DNA cloning technology and its commercialization starting in the mid-1970s. Historians of science, however, have pointedly noted that experimental procedures for making recombinant DNA molecules were initially developed by Stanford biochemist Paul Berg and his colleagues, Peter Lobban and A. Dale Kaiser in the early 1970s. This paper, recognizing the uneasy disjuncture between scientific authorship and legal invention (...) in the history of recombinant DNA technology, investigates the development of recombinant DNA technology in its full scientific context. I do so by focusing on Stanford biochemist Berg's research on the genetic regulation of higher organisms. As I hope to demonstrate, Berg's new venture reflected a mass migration of biomedical researchers as they shifted from studying prokaryotic organisms like bacteria to studying eukaryotic organisms like mammalian and human cells. It was out of this boundary crossing from prokaryotic to eukaryotic systems through virus model systems that recombinant DNA technology and other significant new research techniques and agendas emerged. Indeed, in their attempt to reconstitute 'life' as a research technology, Stanford biochemists' recombinant DNA research recast genes as a sequence that could be rewritten thorough biochemical operations. The last part of this paper shifts focus from recombinant DNA technology's academic origins to its transformation into a genetic engineering technology by examining the wide range of experimental hybridizations which occurred as techniques and knowledge circulated between Stanford biochemists and the Bay Area's experimentalists. Situating their interchange in a dense research network based at Stanford's biochemistry department, this paper helps to revise the canonized history of genetic engineering's origins that emerged during the patenting of Cohen-Boyer's recombinant DNA cloning procedures. (shrink)

William James is remembered as the philosopher of pragmatism, but he was principally the founder of modern scientific psychology. During the period of his most intense scientific involvement James developed a trenchant critique of science. This was not a rejection of science but an attempt to identify limitations of the contemporary conceptualization of science. In particular, James emphasized the failure of science to understand its basis in human emotions. James developed a scientific theory of emotions in which the importance of (...) emotion in cognition and decision-making is central. James’ appreciation of the significance of emotions in science has continuing value. Nevertheless, his characterization of science in terms of its method introduces tensions in his account that an emphasis on the social dimensions of science, which he implicitly acknowledged, tends to resolve. (shrink)

In 1937 Joseph Grinnell founded the University of California’s first biological field station, the Hastings Natural History Reservation. Hastings became a center for field biology on the West Coast, and by 1960 it was serving as a model for the creation of additional U.C. reserves. Today, the U.C. Natural Reserve System is the largest and most diverse network of university-based biological field stations in the world, with 36 sites covering more than 135,000 acres. This essay examines the founding of the (...) Hastings Reservation, and asks how it managed to grow and develop, in the 1940s and 1950s, during a time of declining support for natural history research. It shows how faculty and staff courted the support of key institutional allies, presented themselves as the guardians of a venerable tradition in nature study, and emphasized the station’s capacity to document ecological change and inform environmental policy and management. In the years since, Hastings and other U.C. reserves have played crucial roles in California environmental politics. Biological field stations in the post-war era deserve more attention not only from historians of biology, but also from environmental historians and other scholars interested in the role of science in society. (shrink)

In this fifth chapter of Interpreting Kant in Education, different ideas about subjectivity and objectivity are explored. Kant's first-person stance for investigation, on which subjectivity cannot be escaped, is contrasted with what John McDowell calls the ‘sideways-on’ stance of scientific investigation, which looks to free itself from subjectivity for the sake of a supposed objectivity and neutrality. On Kant's Copernican view, objectivity does not stem from an external world but from a human standpoint within an already up-and-running system of concepts (...) and norms. The idea that objectivity be understood as something within thought and not external to it is considered through a discussion of concepts. Kant's notion of intuition is elaborated to emphasise the factive and objective role it plays in perception and gaining knowledge. And Sebastian Rödl's work is used to show how, in providing the worldly content of thought, intuition ‘situates’ us at a particular time and place, revealing a conception of mind as situated and connected with reality, rather than as detached from it. The objectivity of Kant's view continues to be developed through these chapters, whereas it is largely obscured in the widespread ‘Kantian’ picture in education. (shrink)

In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term “palætiological” have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he (...) enumerated in 1847: the solar system, the Earth, its vegetable and animal creation, and man. For wide and various as their subjects are, it will be found that [the palætiological sciences] have all certain principles, maxims, and rules of procedure in common; and thus may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. William Whewell ( 1847, 1, p. 640). (shrink)

The use of molecules and reactions as evidence, markers and/or traits for evolutionary processes has a history more than a century long. Molecules have been used in studies of intra-specific variation and studies of similarity among species that do not necessarily result in the analysis of phylogenetic relations. Promoters of the use of molecular data have sustained the need for quantification as the main argument to make use of them. Moreover, quantification has allowed intensive statistical analysis, as a condition and (...) a product of increasing automation. All of these analyses are subject to the methodological anxiety characteristic of a community in search of objectivity. It is in this context that scientists compared and evaluated protein and nucleic acid sequence data with other types of molecular data – including immunological, electrophoretic and hybridization data. This paper argues that by looking at long-term historical processes, such as the use of molecular evidence in evolutionary biology, we gain valuable insights into the history of science. In that sense, it accompanies a growing concern among historians for big-pictures of science that incorporate the fruitful historical research on local cases of the last decades. (shrink)

The new discipline of exobiology formed from the intertwining of origin of life research with the search for life or its building blocks on other planets, from 1957-1973. The field was inherently highly interdisciplinary, yet it coalesced very quickly and was responsible in its first twenty years for numerous important contributions to twentieth century life science and planetary sciences such as climatology, the study of mass extinctions, etc. NASA played a very important role in catalyzing the rapid consolidation of exobiology, (...) both through research grants and through sponsored meetings that overcame disciplinary boundaries, bringing together scientists from diverse backgrounds. The presence of a handful of prominent senior scientists such as Joshua Lederberg, Melvin Calvin and Norman Horowitz helped gain credibility for exobiology, in the face of criticism and competition from existing life sciences disciplines. Tensions within the exobiology research community and between NASA-funded science and the academic research community are explored, as are such milestones of discipline formation as journals and professional societies. (shrink)

Both evolutionary theory and Christian faith have a number of things to say about human beings. Evolutionists claim that humans are animals with a bipedal walk, an erect posture, and a large brain, while Christians maintain that, like everything else, human beings are created by God, but that, in contrast to other things on earth, we humans are also created in the image of God. This much is clear, but do either evolutionists or Christians also claim that there is such (...) a thing as a human nature? Or, even if evolutionary theory and Christian faith do not say so explicitly, should we nevertheless assume that they embrace such a view implicitly? In this essay, I argue that we should give an affirmative answer to these questions. I also try to clarify more precisely what it means to say that something has a nature. (shrink)

This paper adopts a symmetrical approach tocontroversies over R.H. MacArthur and E.O. Wilson'sequilibrium model of island biogeography, in order toshow how different interpretations of the model dependupon different philosophical understandings of theapplication of models and theories. In particular,there are quite distinct domains to which the modelcould apply; in addition, some equivocation amongthese domains is important to the model's success.Therefore, apparently inconsistent interpretations,interpretations that fit into roughly instrumentalist,realist and rationalist conceptions of science, may bemutually supporting in practice. Descriptions ofscientific practice, then, (...) should not adjudicate amongthese interpretations, but should instead recognizeways in which successful models translate amongdomains, and in so doing can become realistic,instrumentally successful, or rationally established.As complex social objects, models can afford complexrepresentational relations. (shrink)

The Tree of Life has traditionally been understood to represent the history of species lineages. However, recently researchers have suggested that it might be better interpreted as representing the history of cellular lineages, sometimes called the Tree of Cells. This paper examines and evaluates reasons offered against this cellular interpretation of the Tree of Life. It argues that some such reasons are bad reasons, based either on a false attribution of essentialism, on a misunderstanding of the problem of lineage identity, (...) or on a limited view of scientific representation. I suggest that debate about the Tree of Cells and other successors to the traditional Tree of Life should be formulated in terms of the purposes these representations may serve. In pursuing this strategy, we see that the Tree of Cells cannot serve one purpose suggested for it: as an explanation for the hierarchical nature of taxonomy. We then explore whether, instead, the tree may play an important role in the dynamic modeling of evolution. As highly-integrated complex systems, cells may influence which lineage components can successfully transfer into them and how they change once integrated. Only if they do in fact have a substantial role to play in this process might the Tree of Cells have some claim to be the Tree of Life. (shrink)

This paper is interested in the relationship between evolutionary thinking and moral behavior and commitments, ethics. There is a traditional way of forging or conceiving of the relationship. This is traditional evolutionary ethics, known as Social Darwinism. Many think that this position is morally pernicious, a redescription of the worst aspects of modern, laissez-faire capitalism in fancy biological language. It is argued that, in fact, there is much more to be said for Social Darwinism than many think. In respects, it (...) could be and was an enlightened position to take; but it flounders on the matter of justification. Universally, the appeal is to progress—evolution is progressive and, hence, morally we should aid its success. I argue, however, that this progressive nature of evolution is far from obvious and, hence, traditional social Darwinism fails. There is another way to do things. This is to argue that the search for justification is mistaken. Ethics just is. It is an adaptation for humans living socially and has exactly the same status as other adaptations, like hands and teeth and genitalia. As such, ethics is something with no standing beyond what it is. However, if we all thought that this was so, we would stop being moral. So part of the experience of ethics is that it is more than it is. We think that it has an objective referent. In short, ethics is an illusion put in place by our genes to make us good social cooperators. (shrink)

W.D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land: The Collected Papers of W.D. Hamilton.

After Darwin, experimental biology sought to unravel organisms. By the early twentieth century, organisms were broadly conceived as the product of their heredity and their environment. Much historical work has explored the scientific attack on the genotype, particularly through the new science of genetics. This article explores the tandem efforts to assert experimental control over the environment in which plants grew and developed. The case described here concerns the creation of the first phytotron at Caltech by botanist and plant physiologist (...) Frits Went. Opening in 1949, the phytotron was a plant laboratory that, across a series of rooms and chambers, kept genes constant while regulating and maintaining defined ranges of known environments. This article details the context in which the phytotron emerged, how the phytotron gained its sobriquet, and how it served to cement the “environment” as a category of biological knowledge. Describing the institutional context of Caltech, its interdisciplinary culture, and its encouragement of adopting technology into biological science, I argue that the phytotron and the commensurate category of the “environment” were the product of the familiar movement to integrate the physical and biological sciences. In addition, however, the creation of the phytotron was also a broader story of plant physiologists establishing a definition of the “environment” in both physical and technological terms. (shrink)

The implementation of Project Tiger in India, 1973-1974, was justly hailed as a triumph of international environmental advocacy. It occurred as a growing number of conservation-oriented biologists were beginning to argue forcefully for scientifically managed conservation of species and ecosystems -- the same scientists who would, by the mid-1980s, call themselves conservation biologists. Although India accepted international funds to implement Project Tiger, it strictly limited research posts to Government of India Foresters, against the protests of Indian and US biologists who (...) hoped to conduct the scientific studies that would lead to better management and thus more effective conservation of the tiger. The foresters were not trained to conduct research, and in fact did not produce any of significance for the first 15 years of Project Tiger's existence. The failure of biologists to gain access to India's tigers in the 1970s was caused by many factors, but not least among them was a history of disdain among conservation-oriented biologists for government officials managing reserves, and the local politics of conservation. Project Tiger, then, serves as a case study for the discussion of the intersection of conservation biology with non-scientific concerns, including nationalism and the desire of the Indian government to more completely control its land. (shrink)

This paper aims at bridging a gap between the history of American animal behavior studies and the history of sociobiology. In the post-war period, ecology, comparative psychology and ethology were all investigating animal societies, using different approaches ranging from fieldwork to laboratory studies. We argue that this disunity in “practices of place” explains the attempts of dialogue between those three fields and early calls for unity through “sociobiology” by J. Paul Scott. In turn, tensions between the naturalist tradition and the (...) rising reductionist approach in biology provide an original background for a history of Edward Wilson’s own version of sociobiology, much beyond the William Hamilton’s papers usually considered as its key antecedent. Naturalists were in a defensive position in the geography of the fields studying animal behavior, and in reaction were a driving force behind the various projects of synthesis called “sociobiology”. (shrink)

What sets Naess's deep ecology apart from most inquiries into environmental philosophy is that it does not seek a radical shift in fundamental values. Naess offered a utopian, life-affirming grand narrative, a new Weltanschauung that shifted the focus of inquiry to coupling values, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom to behavior. The core of Naess's approach is that sustainability hinges on developing more thoroughly reasoned and consistent views, policies, and actions, which are tied back to wide-identifying ultimate norms and a rich, well-informed (...) understanding of the state of the planet. But humans can have multiple ultimate norms and these norms sometimes conflict; our neurobiology may not be well-structured for accommodating consequences that are spatially and temporally separated and uncertain; we are governed by bounded rationality; much of human learning results from the passive modeling of unsustainable activities; and our cultures can be maladaptive, creating hurdles and perverse incentives/disincentives that likely demand more than consistent reasoning from wide-identifying ultimate premises. After keenly demonstrating how problem characterization and formulation shape both solution strategies and outcomes, Naess may conceptualize the process of change too narrowly. In the end, deep ecology helps us to shine a brighter searchlight on the gap between our attitudes and our generally unsustainable actions and policies. In doing so it expands the frontier of the unknown, opening more questions. This is its allure, frustration, and promise. (shrink)

Edward O. Wilson’s recent decision to abandon kin selection theory has sent shockwaves throughout the biological sciences. Over the past two years, more than a hundred biologists have signed letters protesting his reversal. Making sense of Wilson’s decision and the controversy it has spawned requires familiarity with the historical record. This entails not only examining the conditions under which kin selection theory first emerged, but also the organicist tradition against which it rebelled. In similar fashion, one must not only examine (...) Wilson’s long career, but also those thinkers who influenced him most, especially his intellectual grandfather, William Morton Wheeler (1865–1937). Wilson belongs to a long line of organicists, biologists whose research highlighted integration and coordination, many of whom struggled over the exact same biological riddles that have long defined Wilson’s career. Drawing inspiration (and sometimes ideas) from these intellectual forebears, Wilson is confident that he has finally identified the origin of the social impulse. (shrink)

Ideas about the natural world are intertwined with the personalities, practices, and the workplaces of scientists. The relationships between these categories are explored in the life of the taxonomist William Steel Creighton. Creighton studied taxonomy under William Morton Wheeler at Harvard University. He took the rules he learned from Wheeler out of the museum and into the field. In testing the rules against a new situation, Creighton found them wanting. He sought a new set of taxonomic principles, one he eventually (...) found in Ernst Mayr's "Systematics and the Origin of Species". Mayr's ideas tied together a number of themes running through Creighton's life: the need for a revised taxonomy, the emphasis on fieldwork, and the search for a new power center for ant taxonomy after Wheeler died. Creighton's adoption of Mayr's ideas as part of his professional identity also had very real implications for his career path: field studies required long and intensive studies, and Creighton would always be a slow worker. His method of taxonomy contrasted sharply not only with Wheeler's but also with two of his younger colleagues, William L. Brown and E. O. Wilson, who took over Wheeler's spot at Harvard in 1950. The disputes between these men over ant taxonomy involved, in addition to questions of technical interest, questions about where and how best to do taxonomy and who could speak with the most authority. Creighton's story reveals how these questions are interrelated. The story also reveals the importance of Mayr's book for changes occurring in taxonomy in the middle of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This study sheds a light on economic roots of optimal foraging/mating theory. Two examples show graphical optimisation models of behavioural ecology that are identical to much older ones of economics. The knowledge transfer has been conscious and explicit in some cases, but also less visible in others. This does no imply plagiarism or misconduct but merely shows how knowledge can diffuse along obscure, sometimes unconscious, routes of non-public and private communication.

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 (...) I believe some exposure to environmental ethics can help focus their interests and goals. I identify three primary areas in which environmental ethics can con- tribute to their education. The first is an examination of who (or what) should be considered to be part of our moral community (i.e., the community to whom we owe direct duties). Is it humans only? Or does it include all sentient life? Or all life? Or ecosystems considered holistically? Often, readings implicitly assume one or more of these answers; the goal is to make the student more sensitive to these implicit claims and to get them to think about the different reasons that support them. The second area, related to the first, is the application of the different answers concerning the extent of the ethical community to real environmental issues and problems. Students need to be aware of how the different answers concerning the moral community can imply conflicting answers for how we should act in certain cases and to think about ways to move toward conflict resolution. The third area in which environmental ethics can contribute is a more conceptual one, focusing on central concepts such as biodiversity, sustainability, species, and ecosystems. Exploring and evaluating various meanings of these terms will make students more reflective and thoughtful citizens and biologists, sensitive to the implications that different conceptual choices make. (shrink)

A darwinian evolutionary approach can contribute to reassess philosophical problems in different fields, including ethics and moral theory. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology address these issues by presupposing mechanisms such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism. However, these mechanisms can’t account for cooperation in the human species. Dual inheritance theory addresses human cooperation differently, by taking into account the above-mentioned classical biological mechanisms without ignoring, however, relevant knowledge produced by social scientists. According to this approach, human social psychology comprises tribal social (...) instincts and symbolic markers. One implication of this approach is that there are innate and universal moral principles hardwired in the human mind-brain, which where selected through an evolutionary process that makes life possible in large, structured social groups. Although innate, these principles are plastically shaped to meet the demands of different cultural niches in particular societies. (shrink)