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 (...) disparaged – if not altogether ignored – by the biologists and philosophers of his era. In this paper, we provide the first systematic examination of Woodger’s oeuvre, and use it to demonstrate that the four preceding claims are false. We argue that Woodger’s ideas have exerted an important influence on biology and philosophy, and submit that the current consensus on his legacy stems from a highly selective reading of his works. By rehabilitating Woodger, we hope to show that there is no good reason to continue to disregard the numerous contributions to the philosophy of biology produced in the decades prior to the professionalization of the discipline. (shrink)

A central thesis of intelligent‐design theorists is that physical and chemical laws and chance are insufficient to account for irreducibly complex biological structures and that intelligent design is necessary to account for such phenomena. This assertion, however, still implies a reductionist ontology. We need to recognize that reality displays multiple modes of being beyond simply chemical and physical modes of being, each of which is governed by laws for that mode of being. This essay argues for an alternate framework for (...) understanding life phenomena that is neither philosophical materialism nor intelligent‐design theory. (shrink)

In the theory and history of ecology, Frederic Clements’s theory of plant communities is usually presented as the historical prototype and a paradigmatic example of synecological organicism, characterised by the assumption that ecological communities are functionally integrated units of mutually dependent species. In this paper, I will object to this standard interpretation of Clements’s theory. Undoubtedly, Clements compares plant communities with organisms and calls them “complex organisms” and “superorganisms”. Further, he can indeed be regarded as a proponent of ecological organicism—provided (...) that one defines ecological organicism as the interpretation of synecological units according to the model of the individual organism. However, Clements’s theory does not include the assumption that mutual dependence is a principle of the organisation of plant communities. Rather, he interprets plant communities as top-down control-hierarchical entities, in which subordinate species depend on dominant species—but not the other way around. Therefore, his theory represents what may be called ‘control-hierarchical organicism’ as against ‘mutualistic organicism’. The erroneous attribution to Clements of ‘mutualistic organicism’ might be due to an unawareness of the existence of different concepts of the organism. This unawareness results in the projection on Clements’s theory of a seemingly self-evident mutualistic concept of organism that Clements himself did not use as a basis for his theory of plant communities. (shrink)

The concept of 'levels of organization' has come under fire recently as being useless for scientific and philosophical purposes. In this paper, we show that 'levels' is actually a remarkably resilient and constructive conceptual tool that can be, and in fact is, used for a variety of purposes. To this effect, we articulate an account of the importance of the levels concept seen in light of its status as a major organizing concept of biology. We argue that the usefulness of (...) ‘levels’ is best seen in the heuristic contributions the concept makes to treating and structuring scientific problems. We illustrate this with two examples from biological research. (shrink)

p style="text-indent: 0cm; line-height: normal" class="MsoBodyTextIndent3"span style="font-size: 11pt"In this paper, I argue that starting with the organelles that constitute a cellmdash;and continuing up the hierarchy of components in processes and subsystems of an organismmdash;there exist clear instances of emergent biological phenomena that can be considered ldquo;livingrdquo; entities.spannbsp; /spanThese components and their attending processes are living emergent phenomena because of the way in which the components are organized to maintain homeostasis of the organism at the various levels in the hierarchy.spannbsp; /spanI (...) call this view the emhomeostatic organization view/em of biological phenomena, and, as is shown, it comports well with the standard philosophical accounts of nomological emergence and representational emergence.spannbsp; /spanTo proffer HOV, I describe properties of biological entities that include internal-hierarchical data exchange, data selectivity, informational integration, and environmental-organismic information exchange.spannbsp; /spanFurther, a distinction is drawn between particularized homeostasis and generalized homeostasis, and I argue that because the various processes and subsystems of an organism are functioning properly in their internal environments, the organism is able to exist as a hierarchically-organized entity in some environment external to it.spannbsp; /spanStated simply: that components of biological phenomena are organized to perform some function resulting in homeostasis marks them out to be living emergent entities distinguishable, in description and in reality, from the very physico-chemical processes of which they are composed./span/p p style="text-indent: 0cm; line-height: normal" class="MsoBodyTextIndent3"span style="font-size: 11pt"nbsp;/span/p. (shrink)

The goal of forming a science of intentional behavior requires a more richly detailed account of symbolic systems than is assumed by the authors. Cultural systems are not simply the equivalent in the ideational domain of culture of the purported Baldwin Effect in the genetic domain. © 2014 Cambridge University Press.

Rudolf Leuckart's 1851 pamphlet Ueber den Polymorphismus der Individuen (On the polymorphism of individuals) stood at the heart of naturalists' discussions on biological individuals, parts and wholes in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Our analysis, which accompanies the first translation of this pamphlet into English, situates Leuckart's contribution to these discussions in two ways. First, we present it as part of a complex conceptual knot involving not only individuality and the understanding of compound organisms, but also the alternation of generations, the (...) division of labor in nature, and the possibility of finding general laws of the organic world. Leuckart's pamphlet is important as a novel attempt to give order to the strands of this knot. It also solved a set of key biological problems in a way that avoided some of the drawbacks of an earlier teleological tradition. Second, we situate the pamphlet within a longer trajectory of inquiry into part-whole relations in biology from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. We argue that biological individuality, along with the problem-complexes with which it engaged, was as central a problem to naturalists before 1859 as evolution, and that Leuckart's contributions to it left a long legacy that persisted well into the twentieth century. As biologists' interests in part-whole relations are once again on the upswing, the longue durée of this problem merits renewed consideration. (shrink)

Description of the biologicalhierarchy of the organism has been extendedhere to included the evolutionary andecological sub-hierarchies with theirrespective levels in order to give a completehierarchical description of life. These newdescriptions include direction of formation,types of constraints, and dual levels. Constraints are produced at the macromolecularlevel of genes/proteins, some of which (a) aredescendent restraints which hold a hierarchytogether and others (b) interact horizontallywith selective agents at corresponding levelsof the niche. The organism is a dual levelconstrained by both the ecologicalsub-hierarchy (survival) and (...) evolutionarysub-hierarchy (fitness) while serving as thehighest level of the specializationsub-hierarchy, therefore, it is unique inbelonging to three sub-hierarchies. Organismsexperience birth, sometimes death, andparticipate in evolution. Birth of an organismis realized when a cell is removed from theconstraints of the organism and assumes itsown organismal constraints. Death occurs withthe cessation of protein synthesis becauseproteins and their products constitutecomponents at high levels of the hierarchy. Selection is of two types, natural selection,involving adaptive traits interacting withfeatures in a niche, and hierarchicalselection, requiring traits to be compatiblewith existing hierarchical constraints. (shrink)

Metaphor influences the construction of biological models and theories and the analysis of its use can reveal important tools of thought. Some aspects of biological organisation are investigated through the analysis of metaphors associated with treating biosystems as a kind of text. In particular, the use of glue and verbs is considered. Some of the reasons why glue is important in the construction of hierarchies are pursued in the light of specific examples, and some of the conceptual links between glue (...) in biology and other domains is discussed. Verbs are shown to be important in the construction of networks. Some of the relations between glue, verb and text are considered and the text metaphor is placed within a much broader context of ideas associated with form, relation and system. The paper concludes with comments on the nature of biological information and the need for extending or better understanding the verbal vocabulary. (shrink)