Human societies are examined as distinct and coherent groups. This trait is most parsimoniously considered a deeply rooted part of our ancestry rather than a recent cultural invention. Our species is the only vertebrate with society memberships of significantly more than 200. We accomplish this by using society-specific labels to identify members, in what I call an anonymous society. I propose that the human brain has evolved to permit not only the close relationships described by the social brain hypothesis, but (...) also, at little mental cost, the anonymous societies within which such alliances are built. The human compulsion to discover or invent labels to “mark” group memberships may originally have been expressed in hominins as vocally learned greetings only slightly different in function from chimpanzee pant hoots (now known to be society-specific). The weight of evidence suggests that at some point, conceivably early in the hominin line, the distinct groups composed of several bands that were typical of our ancestors came to be distinguished by their members on the basis of multiple labels that were socially acquired in this way, the earliest of which would leave no trace in the archaeological record. Often overlooked as research subjects, these sizable fission-fusion communities, in recent egalitarian hunter-gatherers sometimes 2,000 strong, should consistently be accorded the status of societies, in the same sense that this word is used to describe tribes, chiefdoms, and other cultures arising later in our history. The capacity of hunter-gatherer societies to grow sufficiently populous that not all members necessarily recognize one another would make the transition to larger agricultural societies straightforward. Humans differ from chimpanzees in that societal labels are essential to the maintenance of societies and the processes giving birth to new ones. I propose that anonymous societies of all kinds can expand only so far as their labels can remain sufficiently stable. (shrink)

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6 Authors Erika L. Milam, Department of History, University of Maryland, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA Roberta L. Millstein, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Angela Potochnik, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Joan E. Roughgarden, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

After years of activism and scholarship concerning patriarchal social structures, many contemporary societies have made substantial progress in women’s rights. The shortfall, and the work ahead, is well known. Even in societies where the most progress has been achieved, males continue to dominate at key levels of power. Yet, essentialism appears to be widely, although not yet entirely, discounted. In helping to illuminate the social ontology of patriarchy and thereby helping to defuse its injustice, scholars have made proposals of patriarchy’s (...) origins; however, these appear not to be optimally consistent with historical and prehistorical facts. This article offers a different account of patriarchy, arguing that this one can not only explain how such a social condition originated and why it persists, but also point to what may be necessary to do in order to undo it. While I do not contend this ontology of patriarchy is the best possible, it provides a good example of the many issues at stake which an account of patriarchy must explain and points to how we should seek the best ontology as a way of both understanding contemporary societies and suggesting how to rectify a long-standing injustice. (shrink)

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 (...) the ‘moralization of biology’. I conclude by addressing the ambivalent status of this constellation of authors, for whom today ‘morality comes naturally’: I explore both the attractiveness of their message, and the problematic epistemological assumptions of their research programmes in the light of new discoveries in developmental and molecular biology. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to reconstruct the history of genetic and evolutionary theories of same-sex sexual behavior using Imre Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programs . Although distinct, those two programs are complementary. Whereas the genetic program maintains that homosexuality is genetically inherited, the evolutionary program attempts to explain how such a gene, which apparently reduces the reproductive fitness of its homozygous carrier, is maintained in the population. This appraisal reveals that the two research programs have not been empirically (...) progressive in the Lakatosian sense. I argue that this situation has arisen precisely because of inappropriate over-commitment to the respective hard cores of the two research programs. As adherence to such cores is essential for success in research programs, according to Lakatos, I argue that Lakatos’ account of science may be descriptively adequate but is normatively inadequate. I provide grounds for generalizing this case as follows: the MSRP may successfully capture the logic of axiomised sciences, such as physics, but applies poorly to most sciences, including biological and social sciences, which do not lend themselves to axiomatic organization. (shrink)

Georgios Mantzarides; Globalization and Universality: Chimera and Truth, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 J.

The classical social theorist Emile Durkheim proposed the counterintuitive thesis that crime is beneficial for society because it provokes punishment, which enhances social solidarity. His logic, however, is blemished by a reified view of society that leads to group-selectionist thinking and a teleological account of the causes of crime. Reconceptualization of the relationship between crime and punishment in terms of evolutionary game theory, however, suggests that crime (cheating) may confer benefits on cooperating individuals by promoting stability in their patterns of (...) cooperation. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop a model of life history theory that incorporates environmental influences, contextual influences, and heritable variation. I argue that physically or psychologically stressful environments delay maturation and the onset of reproductive competence. The social context is also important, and here I concentrate on the opportunity for upward social mobility as a contextual influence that results in delaying reproduction and lowering fertility in the interest of increasing investment in children. I also review evidence that (...) variation in life history strategies is influenced by genetic variation as well. Finally, I show that cultural shifts in the social control of sexual behavior have had differential effects on individuals predisposed to high- versus low-investment reproductive strategies. (shrink)

Modern scientific theories of emotional behavior, almost without exception, trace their origin to Charles Darwin, and his publications On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The most famous evolutionary dilemma Darwin acknowledged as a challenge to his theory of natural selection was the incomplete sub Cambrian fossil record. However, Darwin struggled with two other rarely referenced theoretical and scientific dilemmas that confounded his theories about emotional behavior. These included (1) the (...) origin of social instincts (e.g., altruism, empathy, reciprocity and cooperation) and the reasons for their conservation in evolution and (2) the peripheral control of heart rate vis-a-vis emotional behavior outside of consciousness. Darwin acknowledged that social instincts are critical to the survival of some species, but had difficulty aligning them with his theory of natural selection in humans. Darwin eventually proposed that heart rate and emotions are controlled via one’s intellect and cortical mechanisms, and that instinctive behavior is genetically-programmed and inherited. Despite ongoing efforts, these two theoretical dilemmas are debated to this day. Simple testable hypotheses have yet to emerge for the biological mechanisms underlying instinctive behavior or the way heart rate is controlled in infants. In this paper, we review attempts to resolve ¬these issues over the past 160 years. We posit that research and theories that supported Darwin’s individualistic brain-centric and genetic model have become an “orthodox” Western view of emotional behavior, one that produced the prevailing behavioral construct of attachment as developed by John Bowlby. We trace research and theories that challenged this orthodoxy at various times, and show how these challenges were repeatedly overlooked, rejected, or misinterpreted. We review two new testable theories, emotional connection theory and calming cycle theory, which we argue resolve the two dilemmas We show emerging scientific evidence from physiology and a wide variety of other fields, as well from clinical trials among prematurely born infants, that supports the two theories. Clinical implications of the new theories and possible new ways to assess risk and intervene in emotional, behavioral and developmental disorders are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The “symmetry assumption” in public-choice theory—the idea that people act just as selfishly in the political sphere as they do in the economic sphere—is a good theory that runs afoul of much of the evidence. The public-choice theorists in this symposium, Munger and Mueller, have thus retreated from claiming that public choice explains most political behavior, with Munger positing it as an ideal type that, in principle, might explain no behavior at all. For example, Berman suggests that even politicians (...) who say and do “anything” to be elected or re-elected may well do so in order to acquire the power they think they need if they are to enact policies that will serve the public good. The normative project of “constitutional political economy” into which the original, empirical version of public choice seems to have evolved may or may not tell us how to structure institutions to prevent greedy actors from using politics as a means to their personal aggrandizement. But that project cannot, even hypothetically, produce the public-choice “findings” of widespread self-interestedness in politics that my book found were nonexistent. (shrink)

The Neurogenomic Paradigm. Anthropological Dimensions and Freedom in the Care of the Patient: The experimental scientific method disengages the body from the mind and the spirit. Ascertaining the meaning of each individual may overcome the methodological limitations within the current scientific paradigm. The noetic clues afforded by Neurogenomics via an integrative anthropological perspective should pave the way to heal the individual who feels ill, at the heart of his or her disease.

In 1961, Ernst Mayr published a highly influential article on the nature of causation in biology, in which he distinguished between proximate and ultimate causes. Mayr argued that proximate causes (e.g. physiological factors) and ultimate causes (e.g. natural selection) addressed distinct ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and were not competing alternatives. That distinction retains explanatory value today. However, the adoption of Mayr’s heuristic led to the widespread belief that ontogenetic processes are irrelevant to evolutionary questions, a belief that has (1) hindered (...) progress within evolutionary biology, (2) forged divisions between evolutionary biology and adjacent disciplines and (3) obstructed several contemporary debates in biology. Here we expand on our earlier (Laland et al. in Science 334:1512–1516, 2011) argument that Mayr’s dichotomous formulation has now run its useful course, and that evolutionary biology would be better served by a concept of reciprocal causation, in which causation is perceived to cycle through biological systems recursively. We further suggest that a newer evolutionary synthesis is unlikely to emerge without this change in thinking about causation. (shrink)

The cybernetic definition of a living individual proposed previously (Korzeniewski, 2001) is very abstract and therefore describes the essence of life in a very formal and general way. In the present article this definition is reformulated in order to determine clearly the relation between life in general and a living individual in particular, and it is further explained and defended. Next, the cybernetic definition of a living individual is confronted with the real world. It is demonstrated that numerous restrictions imposed (...) on the cybernetic definition of life by physical reality imply a number of particular properties of life that characterize present life on Earth, namely: (1) a living individual must be a dissipative structure (and therefore a low-entropy thermodynamic system out of the state of equilibrium); (2) spontaneously-originated life must be based on organic compounds; (3) evolutionarily stable self-dependent, free-living individuals must have some minimal level of complexity of structure and function; (4) a living individual must have a record of identity separated from an executive machinery; (5) the identity of living individuals must mutate and may evolve; (6) living individuals may collect and accumulate information in subsequent generations over very long periods of time; (7) the degree of complexity of a living individual reflects the degree of complexity of its environment (ecological niche) and (8) living individuals are capable of supple adaptation to varying environmental conditions. Thus, the cybernetic definition of a living individual, when confronted with the real physical world, generates most of the general properties of the present life on Earth. (shrink)

The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both deficiencies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet (...) the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene–culture coevolution.Vaulting Ambitionthus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior. (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould is rightly remembered for many different kinds of contributions to our intellectual life. I focus on his criticisms of uses of evolutionary ideas to defend inegalitarian doctrines and on his attempts to expand the framework of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I argue that his important successes in the former sphere are applications of the idea of local critique, grounded in careful attention to the details of the inegalitarian proposals. As he became more concerned with the second project, Gould (...) was inclined to suggest that the abuses of evolutionary ideas rested on an insufficiently expanded Darwinism. I suggest that what is valuable in Gould's contribution to general evolutionary theory is the original claim about punctuated equilibrium (advanced, with Niles Eldredge in1972), and the careful defense of that claim through the accumulation of paleontological evidence. I try to show that the more ambitious program of a hierarchical expansion of neo-Darwinism is misguided, and that the endeavor to go beyond local critique fails. (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)

David Hume has warned us not to endeavor to derive an “ought” from an “is” (1990, 469–70), reprimanding those who attempt to draw value judgments from empirical facts. But Judith Jarvis Thomson refuses to accept that values and facts are logically disjoint in this manner, primarily because of her worry that such a partition of our moral values from the “facts” will place a grave limitation on any ethical system, namely, that its claims apparently cannot be proven. Consequently, Thomson is (...) on the lookout for some provably true facts that can be used, contra Hume, to draw conclusions about moral values. Thomson begins by rejecting all generalist conceptions of the good (specifically, the utilitarian's identification of the good with pleasure) and proceeds to fracture the good into various kinds of “goodness in a way,” hoping to produce by this disintegration some moral facts that can be used to set ethics on an objective foundation. But I will argue that Thomson's so‐called objective facts are actually nothing but disguised moral claims, and that in attempting to sidestep the classic fallacy identified by Hume, she has blundered into another pitfall—the Smuggler's Fallacy, the offense of concealing her moral conclusions inside the premises of her argument. (shrink)

In the paper, I aim to reconstruct a charitable interpretation of Durkheimian utilitarianism, a normative theory of public morality proposed by well-recognised American moral psychologist – Jonathan Haidt, which might provide reasons to justify particular legal regulations and public policies. The reconstruction contains a coherent theory that includes elements of rule-utilitarianism, value pluralism, objective list theory and perfectionism, as well as references to Emile’s Durkheim views on human nature. I also compare Durkheimian utilitarianism with two similar theories – Brad Hooker’s (...) rule consequentialism and Krzysztof Saja’s institutional function consequentialism. (shrink)

The sociobiology debate, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, featured many of the same issues disputed in the culture war in the humanities during this same time period. This is evident from a study of the writings of Edward O. Wilson, the best known of the sociobiologists, and from an examination of both the minutes of the meetings of the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) and the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, the SSG's most prominent member. Many critics of (...) sociobiology, frequently radical scientists who were attached to the lineage of the New Left, argued for the same multicultural values promoted by radical humanities professors in this period. Conversely, liberal sociobiologists defended the universalist values of the liberals in the humanities. Those scholars whose work was important before the cultural revolution in the 1960s were usually committed to a liberal universalism that emphasized the similarity between people. Younger scholars, who took faculty positions in the 1970s and after, were more likely to owe an allegiance to an ethnos-centered social vision that valued identity politics. The struggle between these two agendas, more intellectual than generational, was at the core of the culture wars both in the humanities and in the sciences. The sociobiology debate should be viewed in this light. (shrink)

The current research applied a mid-level evolutionary theory that has been successfully employed across numerous animal species—life history theory—in an attempt to understand the Dark Triad personality trait cluster (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism). In Study 1 (N = 246), a measure of life history strategy was correlated with psychopathy, but unexpectedly with neither Machiavellianism nor narcissism. Study 2 (N = 321) replicated this overall pattern of results using longer, traditional measures of the Dark Triad traits and alternative, future-discounting indicators of (...) life history strategy (a smaller-sooner, larger-later monetary dilemma and self-reported risk-taking behaviors). Additional findings suggested two sources of shared variance across the Dark Triad traits: confidence in predicting future outcomes and openness to short-term mating. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss how information theory has been used in the study of animal communication, as well as how these uses are justified. Biologists justify their use of Shannon’s information measures by the work they do in allowing for comparisons between different organisms and because they measure a quantity that is purported to be important for natural selection. I argue that there are problems with both sorts of justification. To make these difficulties clear, I focus on the use (...) of Shannon’s information measures to quantify the amount of information transmitted by the fire ant’s odor trail and the honeybee’s waggle dance. Both of these systems are relatively simple and well understood, and the application of Shannon’s information measure to these systems initially seemed very promising and relatively straightforward. They are therefore particularly suitable for revealing the benefits and difficulties of applying Shannon’s information measures to biological systems in general, and animal communication systems in particular. (shrink)

Dissent is thought to play a valuable role in science, so that scientific communities ought to create opportunities for receiving critical feedback and take dissenting views seriously. There is concern, however, that some dissent does more harm than good. Dissent on climate change and evolutionary theory, for example, has confused the public, created doubt about existing consensus, derailed public policy, and forced scientists to devote resources to respond. Are there limits to the extent to which scientific communities have obligations to (...) seek and engage dissenting views? We consider the two main criteria that have been offered for what constitutes “normatively appropriate dissent” or the sort of dissent that ought to have the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously. Many have argued that dissenters must (1) engage in uptake of criticism against their own views and (2) share some standards for theory appraisal. We argue these criteria ultimately are unsuccessful. (shrink)

Academia is subdivided into separate disciplines, most of which are quite discrete. In this review I trace the interactions between two of these disciplines: biology and philosophy of biology. I concentrate on those topics that have the most extensive biological content: function, species, systematics, selection, reduction and development. In the final section of this paper I touch briefly on those issues that biologists and philosophers have addressed that do not have much in the way of biological content.

Is it possible to be a socio-biologist and a feminist? Socio-biology has been accused of being a macho ideological arsenal, which seems to exclude in advance any possibility of amending it. However that was the project of several female researchers (in particular S. B. Hrdy and P. A. Gowaty), who suggested adopting the science’s theoretical framework in order to change it from within. This has been expressed in a change of focus: an appeal to take account of female strategies and (...) their evolution as well as the "sex war" at work in process of reproduction. This opening out of socio-biology’s theoretical framework has not been undertaken in the name of the privilege of a "female perspective" but it has without a doubt been nourished by the researchers’ marginal position in their discipline as well as their political involvement. "Male" contributions, such as W. G. Eberhard’s work on the "female’s cryptic choice", are also part of this movement though they do not claim allegiance to it. Similarly, a critical study has been carried out on the vocabulary of socio-biology: not in order to exercise a "politically correct" ideological tyranny but to improve the efficiency of the conceptual tools introduced by the science. Today some feminists think feminism should incorporate socio-biology’s results but resistance still remains strong. Though many feminists think feminism has more to bring to biology than the reverse, many biologists consider that feminism is just an ideology that should remain apart from scientific work. (shrink)

This paper examines the history of animal behavior studies after the synthesis period. Three episodes are considered: the adoption of the theory of natural selection, the mathematization of ideas, and the spread of molecular methods in behavior studies. In these three episodes, students of behavior adopted practices and standards developed in population ecology and population genetics. While they borrowed tools and methods from these fields, they made distinct uses that set them relatively apart and led them to contribute, in their (...) own way, to evolutionary theory. These episodes also highlight some limitations of “conjunction narratives” centered on the relation between a discipline and the modern synthesis. A trend in conjunction narratives is to interpret any development related to evolution in a discipline as an “extension,” an “integration,” or as a “delayed” synthesis. I here suggest that this can lead to underestimate discontinuities in the history of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Histories of psychology regularly celebrate the foundational role played in the development of early American psychology by Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, and in particular the development of functional psychology and behaviorism. In this article it is argued that although Darwin's theory did play an influential role, early American psychology did not generally reflect the hereditarian determinism of his theory of evolution by natural selection. However, early American psychologists did accept one critical implication of Darwin's theory, which is (...) that evolution by natural selection does not ensure the highest development of the human race. This partly explains the social interventive zeal that was a distinctive feature of early American psychology. (shrink)

Evolutionary biology and feminism share a variety of philosophical and practical concerns. I have tried to describe how a perspective from both evolutionary biology and feminism can accelerate the achievement of goals for both feminists and evolutionary biologists. In an early section of this paper I discuss the importance of variation to the disciplines of evolutionary biology and feminism. In the section entitled “Control of Female Reproduction” I demonstrate how insight provided by participation in life as woman and also as (...) a feminist suggests testable hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior—hypotheses that are applicable to our investigations of the evolution of social behavior in nonhuman animals. In the section on “Deceit, Self-deception, and Patriarchal Reversals” I have overtly conceded that evolutionary biology, a scientific discipline, also represents a human cultural practice that, like other human cultural practices, may in parts and at times be characterized by deceit and self-deception. In the section on “Femininity” I have indicated how questions cast and answered and hypotheses tested from an evolutionary perspective can serve women and men struggling with sexist oppression. (shrink)

Evolutionary biologists, evolutionary epistemologists, and biosemioticians have demonstrated that organisms not merely adapt to an external world, but that they actively construct their environmental, sociocultural, and cognitive niches. Denis Noble demonstrates that such is no different for those organisms that engage in science, and he lays bare several crucial assumptions that define the scientific dogmas and practices of evolutionary biology.

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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)

The aim of the present volume is to draw the balance of naturalism's success so far.

This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretical framework to the study of biological communication, we focus on a specific approach, based on the notion of influence, according to which communication takes place when a signal emitted by a (...) sender triggers a change in the behaviour of the receiver that is functional for the sender itself. We critically analyse the current formulations of this account, that interpret what is functional for the sender in terms of evolutionary adaptations. Specifically, the adoption of this etiological functional framework may lead to the exclusion of several phenomena usually studied as instances of communication, and possibly even of entire fields of investigation such as synthetic biology. As an alternative, we reframe the influence approach in organisational terms, characterising functions in terms of contributions to the current organisation of a biological system. We develop a theoretical account of biological communication in which communicative functions are distinguished from other types of biological functions described by the organisational account (e.g. metabolic, ecological, etc.). The resulting organisational-influence approach allows to carry out causal analyses of current instances of phenomena of communication, without the need to provide etiological explanations. In such a way it makes it possible to understand in terms of communication those phenomena which realise interactive patterns typical of signalling interactions – and are usually studied as such in scientific practice – despite not being the result of evolutionary adaptations. Moreover, this approach provides operational tools to design and study communicative interactions in experimental fields such as synthetic biology. (shrink)

Humanists argue for assigning the highest moral status to all humans over any non-humans directly or indirectly on the basis of uniquely superior human cognitive abilities. They may also claim that humanism is the strongest position from which to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of within-species discrimination. I argue that changing conceptual foundations in comparative research and discoveries of advanced cognition in many non-human species reveal humanism’s psychological speciesism and its similarity with common justifications of within-species discrimination.

This article addresses the emergence of human personality in evolution. The mechanisms of natural and sexual selection developed by Darwin are not sufficient to explain the sense of self. Therefore we attempt to trace the evolutionary process back to a form of selection termed “emotional selection.” This involves reconstructing selection out of subjective qualities and showing how emotions enable human forms of life that are relevant for the cultural level of cooperation that marks our species. We see a paradigm shift (...) in the concept of emotional selection that binds emotion and evolution closer together, thus closing the explanatory gap between classical ethology and modern evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what organisms are and therefore what kinds of biological entities qualify as organisms. For some time now, the concept of organismality has been eclipsed by the notion of individuality. Biological individuals are those systems that are units of selection. I develop a conception of organismality that does not rely on evolutionary considerations, but instead draws on development and ecology. On this account, organismality and individuality can come apart. Organisms, in my view, are as Godfrey-Smith (...) puts it “essentially persisters.” I argue that persistence is underpinned by differentiation, integration, development, and the constitutive embeddedness of organisms in their worlds. I examine two marginal cases, the Portuguese Man O’ War and the honey bee colony, and show that both count as organisms in light of my analysis. Next, I examine the case of holobionts, hosts plus their microsymbionts, and argue that they can be counted as organisms even though they may not be biological individuals. Finally, I consider the question of whether other, less tightly integrated biological systems might also be treated as organisms. (shrink)

Comparative biology is afield that deals with morphology. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe recognised comparative biology, not as a passive science obsessed with counting similarities as it is today, but as an active field wherein he sought to perceive the inter-relationships of individual organisms to the organic whole, which he termed the archetype. I submit that Goethe's archetype and his application of a technique termed the Anschauung are rigorous and significant ways to conduct delicate empiricism in comparative biology. The future of (...) comparative biology lies in the use of the Anschauung to communicate the archetype as a set of inter-relationships of homologues that we perceive intuitively. In this essay I present how the extension of our own intuitive perception forms the foundations of a method for seeing and discovering the archetype in comparative biology. (shrink)

Evolutionary biologists have grappled with the question of the emergenceand maintenance of cooperation since Darwin first listed animal cooperation asapotential problem for his theory of natural selection. Here I review four pathsthat have been delineated in the study of intra-specific cooperation amonganimals. These paths – kinship, reciprocity, byproduct mutualism andgroupselection – serve as a starting point for behavioral ecologistsinterestedstudying the initiation and maintenance of cooperation. After reviewing theempirical and theoretical underpinnings of these paths to cooperation, I touchupon some recent work (...) that has attempted to examine (or reexamine) the role ofphylogeny, punishment and morality in the light of cooperative behavior. (shrink)