Microbes and microbiology are seldom encountered in philosophical accounts of the life sciences. Although microbiology is a well-established science and microbes the basis of life on this planet, neither the organisms nor the science have been seen as philosophically significant. This book will change that. It fills a major gap in the philosophy of biology by examining central philosophical issues in microbiology. Topics are drawn from evolutionary microbiology, microbial ecology, and microbial classification. These discussions are aimed at philosophers and scientists (...) who wish to gain insight into the basic philosophical issues of microbiology. (shrink)

This is a highly welcome book that offers a fresh perspective on the philosophy of biology. It is of interest to both philosophers and biologists and to experienced readers as well as novices. The book is structured into four sections ‘Science’, ‘Biology’, ‘Microbes’ and ‘Humans’ and consists of a collection of articles written by John Dupré over the past few years.

This paper examines David Hull’s and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s accounts of biological individuality using the case of biofilms. Biofilms fail standard criteria for individuality, such as having reproductive bottlenecks and forming parent-offspring lineages. Nevertheless, biofilms are good candidates for individuals. The nature of biofilms shows that Godfrey-Smith’s account of individuality, with its reliance on reproduction, is too restrictive. Hull’s interactor notion of individuality better captures biofilms, and we argue that it offers a better account of biological individuality. However, Hull’s notion of (...) interactor needs more precision. We suggest some ways to make Hull’s notion of interactor and his account of individuality more precise. Generally, we maintain that biofilms are a good test case for theories of individuality, and a careful examination of biofilms furthers our understanding of biological individuality. (shrink)

We address three fundamental questions: What does it mean for an entity to be living? What is the role of inter-organismic collaboration in evolution? What is a biological individual? Our central argument is that life arises when lineage-forming entities collaborate in metabolism. By conceiving of metabolism as a collaborative process performed by functional wholes, which are associations of a variety of lineage-forming entities, we avoid the standard tension between reproduction and metabolism in discussions of life – a tension particularly evident (...) in discussions of whether viruses are alive. Our perspective assumes no sharp distinction between life and non-life, and does not equate life exclusively with cellular or organismal status. We reach this conclusion through an analysis of the capabilities of a spectrum of biological entities, in which we include the pivotal case of viruses as well as prions, plasmids, organelles, intracellular and extracellular symbionts, unicellular and multicellular life-forms. The usual criterion for classifying many of the entities of our continuum as non-living is autonomy. This emphasis on autonomy is problematic, however, because even paradigmatic biological individuals, such as large animals, are dependent on symbiotic associations with many other organisms. These composite individuals constitute the metabolic wholes on which selection acts. Finally, our account treats cooperation and competition not as polar opposites but as points on a continuum of collaboration. We suggest that competitive relations are a transitional state, with multi-lineage metabolic wholes eventually outcompeting selfish competitors, and that this process sometimes leads to the emergence of new types or levels of wholes. Our view of life as a continuum of variably structured collaborative systems leaves open the possibility that a variety of forms of organized matter – from chemical systems to ecosystems – might be usefully understood as living entities. (shrink)

Group-structured and neighbor-structured populations are compared, especially in relation to multilevel selection theory and evolutionary transitions. I argue that purely neighborstructured populations, which can feature the evolution of altruism, are not properly described in multilevel terms. The ability to “gestalt switch” between individualist and multilevel frameworks is then linked to the investigation of “major transitions” in evolution. Some explanatory concepts are naturally linked to one framework or the other, but a full understanding is best achieved via the use of both.

The authors demonstrate that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.

Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.

Group-structured populations, of the kind prominent in discussions of multilevel selection, are contrasted with ‘neighbor-structured’ populations. I argue that it is a necessary condition on multilevel description of a selection process that there should be a nonarbitrary division of the population into equivalence classes (or an approximation to this situation). The discussion is focused via comparisons between two famous problem cases involving group structure (altruism and heterozygote advantage) and two neighbor-structured cases that resemble them. Conclusions are also drawn about the (...) role of correlated interaction in the evolution of altruism. 1 Introduction 2 Two Kinds of Population Structure 3 Objections and Replies 4 Particles on a Line 5 Conclusion Appendix: Neighborhoods and Selection CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Hierarchical expansions of the theory of natural selection exist in two distinct bodies of thought in evolutionary biology, the group selection and the species selection traditions. Both traditions share the point of view that the principles of natural selection apply at levels of biological organization above the level of the individual organism. This leads them both to considermultilevel selection situations, where selection is occurring simultaneously at more than one level. Impeding unification of the theoretical approaches of the multilevel selection traditions (...) are the different goals of investigators in the different subdisciplines and the different types of data potentially available for analysis. We identify two alternative approaches to multilevel situations, which we termmultilevel selection [1] andmultilevel selection [2]. Of interest in the former case are the effects of group membership onindividual fitnesses, and in the latter the tendencies for the groups themselves to go extinct or to found new groups (i.e., group fitnesses). We argue that: neither represents the entire multilevel selection process; both are aspects of any multilevel selection situation; and both are legitimate approaches, suitable for answering different questions. Using this formalism, we show that: multilevel selection [2] does not require emergent group properties in order to provide an explanatory mechanism of evolutionary change; multilevel selection [1] is usually more appropriate for neontological group selection studies; and species selection is most fruitfully considered from the point of view of multilevel selection [2]. Finally we argue that the effect hypothesis of macroevolution, requiring, in selection among species, both the absence of group effects on organismic fitness (multilevel selection [1]), and the direct determination of species fitnesses by those of organisms, is untestable with paleontological data. Furthermore, the conditions for the effect hypothesis to hold are extremely restrictive and unlikely to apply to the vast majority of situations encountered in nature. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology, along with everyone else, generally perceive life to fall into two broad categories, the microbes and macrobes, and then pay most of their attention to the latter. ‘Macrobe’ is the word we propose for larger life forms, and we use it as part of an argument for microbial equality. We suggest that taking more notice of microbes – the dominant life form on the planet, both now and throughout evolutionary history – will transform some of the philosophy (...) of biology’s standard ideas on ontology, evolution, taxonomy and biodiversity. We set out a number of recent developments in microbiology – including biofilm formation, chemotaxis, quorum sensing and gene transfer – that highlight microbial capacities for cooperation and communication and break down conventional thinking that microbes are solely or primarily single-celled organisms. These insights also bring new perspectives to the levels of selection debate, as well as to discussions of the evolution and nature of multicellularity, and to neo-Darwinian understandings of evolutionary mechanisms. We show how these revisions lead to further complications for microbial classification and the philosophies of systematics and biodiversity. Incorporating microbial insights into the philosophy of biology will challenge many of its assumptions, but also give greater scope and depth to its investigations. (shrink)

The debate over the relative importance of natural selection as compared to other forces affecting the evolution of organisms is a long-standing and central controversy in evolutionary biology. The theory of adaptationism argues that natural selection contains sufficient explanatory power in itself to account for all evolution. However, there are differing views about the efficiency of the adaptation model of explanation. If the adaptationism theory is applied, are energy and resources being used to their optimum? This book presents an up-to-date (...) view of this controversy and reflects the dramatic changes in our understanding of evolution that have occurred in the last twenty years. The volume combines contributions from biologists and philosophers, and offers a systematic treatment of foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues surrounding the theory of adaptationism. The essays examine recent developments in topics such as phylogenetic analysis, the theory of optimality and ess models, and methods of testing models. (shrink)

Our understanding of what microbes are and how they evolve has undergone many radical shifts since the late nineteenth century, when many still believed that bacteria could be spontaneously generated and most thought microbial “species” (if any) to be unstable and interchangeable in form and function (pleomorphic). By the late twentieth century, an ontology based on single cells and definable species with predictable properties, evolving like species of animals or plants, was widely accepted. Now, however, genomic and metagenomic data show (...) that lateral gene transfer compromises this picture of stability and predictability, and refocuses our attention on multilineage communities. Treating such communities as unstable but identifiable evolving “individuals” makes us again pleomorphists, of a sort. (shrink)

The book presents a new way of understanding Darwinism and evolution by natural selection, combining work in biology, philosophy, and other fields.