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  1. From 'Circumstances' to 'Environment': Herbert Spencer and the Origins of the Idea of Organism–Environment Interaction.Trevor Pearce - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (3):241-252.
    The word ‘environment’ has a history. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a singular, abstract entity—the organism—interacting with another singular, abstract entity—the environment—was virtually unknown. In this paper I trace how the idea of a plurality of external conditions or circumstances was replaced by the idea of a singular environment. The central figure behind this shift, at least in Anglo-American intellectual life, was the philosopher Herbert Spencer. I examine Spencer’s work from 1840 to 1855, demonstrating that he was exposed (...)
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  • Developmental Systems Theory Formulated as a Claim about Inherited Representations.Nicholas Shea - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (1):60-82.
    Developmental Systems Theory (DST) emphasises the importance of non-genetic factors in development and their relevance to evolution. A common, deflationary reaction is that it has long been appreciated that non-genetic factors are causally indispensable. This paper argues that DST can be reformulated to make a more substantive claim: that the special role played by genes is also played by some (but not all) non-genetic resources. That special role is to transmit inherited representations, in the sense of Shea (2007: Biology and (...)
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  • Causation in biology: Stability, specificity, and the choice of levels of explanation.James Woodward - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (3):287-318.
    This paper attempts to elucidate three characteristics of causal relationships that are important in biological contexts. Stability has to do with whether a causal relationship continues to hold under changes in background conditions. Proportionality has to do with whether changes in the state of the cause “line up” in the right way with changes in the state of the effect and with whether the cause and effect are characterized in a way that contains irrelevant detail. Specificity is connected both to (...)
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  • Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation.James F. Woodward - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.
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  • Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism.Elliott Sober - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (3):350-383.
    Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems are often taken to be the decisive (...)
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  • Developmental systems and evolutionary explanation.P. E. Griffiths & R. D. Gray - 1994 - Journal of Philosophy 91 (6):277-304.
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  • Knowledge of Life.Georges Canguilhem - 2022 - Fordham University Press.
    As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do transformations (...)
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  • What difference does quantity make? On the epistemology of Big Data in biology.Sabina Leonelli - 2014 - Big Data and Society 1 (1):2053951714534395.
    Is Big Data science a whole new way of doing research? And what difference does data quantity make to knowledge production strategies and their outputs? I argue that the novelty of Big Data science does not lie in the sheer quantity of data involved, but rather in the prominence and status acquired by data as commodity and recognised output, both within and outside of the scientific community and the methods, infrastructures, technologies, skills and knowledge developed to handle data. These developments (...)
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  • Review of Woodward, Making Things Happen. [REVIEW]Michael Strevens - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1):233-249.
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  • The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment.Richard Lewontin - 2000 - Journal of the History of Biology 33 (3):611-612.
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  • The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History.Marjorie Grene & David Depew - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by David J. Depew.
    Is life different from the non-living? If so, how? And how, in that case, does biology as the study of living things differ from other sciences? These questions are traced through an exploration of episodes in the history of biology and philosophy. The book begins with Aristotle, then moves on to Descartes, comparing his position with that of Harvey. In the eighteenth century the authors consider Buffon and Kant. In the nineteenth century the authors examine the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate, pre-Darwinian geology (...)
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  • Idealization in evolutionary developmental investigation: a tension between phenotypic plasticity and normal stages.Alan C. Love - 2010 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365:679–690.
    Idealization is a reasoning strategy that biologists use to describe, model and explain that purposefully departs from features known to be present in nature. Similar to other strategies of scientific reasoning, idealization combines distinctive strengths alongside of latent weaknesses. The study of ontogeny in model organisms is usually executed by establishing a set of normal stages for embryonic development, which enables researchers in different laboratory contexts to have standardized comparisons of experimental results. Normal stages are a form of idealization because (...)
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  • Causes That Make a Difference.C. Kenneth Waters - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (11):551-579.
    Biologists studying complex causal systems typically identify some factors as causes and treat other factors as background conditions. For example, when geneticists explain biological phenomena, they often foreground genes and relegate the cellular milieu to the background. But factors in the milieu are as causally necessary as genes for the production of phenotypic traits, even traits at the molecular level such as amino acid sequences. Gene-centered biology has been criticized on the grounds that because there is parity among causes, the (...)
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  • Introduction: What is developmental systems theory?Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray - 2001 - In Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray (eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. MIT Press. pp. 1-11.
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  • The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo.Ron Amundson - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
    In this book Ron Amundson examines two hundred years of scientific views on the evolution-development relationship from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology. This perspective challenges several popular views about the history of evolutionary thought by claiming that many earlier authors had made history come out right for the Evolutionary Synthesis. The book starts with a revised history of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. It then investigates how development became irrelevant with the Evolutionary Synthesis. It concludes with an examination of the contrasts (...)
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  • Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously.Jason Scott Robert - 2004 - Cambridge University Press.
    Historically, philosophers of biology have tended to sidestep the problem of development by focusing primarily on evolutionary biology and, more recently, on molecular biology and genetics. Quite often too, development has been misunderstood as simply, or even primarily, a matter of gene activation and regulation. Nowadays a growing number of philosophers of science are focusing their analyses on the complexities of development, and in Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution Jason Scott Robert explores the nature of development against current trends in biological (...)
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  • Against normal function.Ron Amundson - 2000 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31 (1):33-53.
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  • Measuring Causal Specificity.Paul E. Griffiths, Arnaud Pocheville, Brett Calcott, Karola Stotz, Hyunju Kim & Rob Knight - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (4):529-555.
    Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed measure by measuring the (...)
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  • Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life.Robert E. Kohler - 1995 - Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1):167-170.
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  • Data Interpretation in the Digital Age.Sabina Leonelli - 2014 - Perspectives on Science 22 (3):397-417.
    Scientific knowledge production is currently affected by the dissemination of data on an unprecedented scale. Technologies for the automated production and sharing of vast amounts of data have changed the way in which data are handled and interpreted in several scientific domains, most notably molecular biology and biomedicine. In these fields, the activity of data gathering has become increasingly technology-driven, with machines such as next generation genome sequencers and mass spectrometers generating billions of data points within hours, and with little (...)
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  • The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences.Ian Hacking - 1992 - In Andrew Pickering (ed.), Science as practice and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 29--64.
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  • A Mixed Self: The Role of Symbiosis in Development.Thomas Pradeu - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (1):80-88.
    Since the 1950s, the common view of development has been internalist: development is seen as the result of the unfolding of potentialities already present in the egg cell. In this article, I show that this view is incorrect because of the crucial influence of the environment on development. I focus on a fascinating example, that of the role played by symbioses in development, especially bacterial symbioses, a phenomenon found in virtually all organisms (plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates). I claim that we (...)
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  • Causal Selection versus Causal Parity in Biology: Relevant Counterfactuals and Biologically Normal Interventions.Marcel Weber - forthcoming - In Waters C. Kenneth & Woodward James (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Causal Reasoning in Biology. Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science. Vol. XXI. University of Minnesota Press.
    Causal selection is the task of picking out, from a field of known causally relevant factors, some factors as elements of an explanation. The Causal Parity Thesis in the philosophy of biology challenges the usual ways of making such selections among different causes operating in a developing organism. The main target of this thesis is usually gene centrism, the doctrine that genes play some special role in ontogeny, which is often described in terms of information-bearing or programming. This paper is (...)
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  • The Central Dogma as a Thesis of Causal Specificity.Marcel Weber - 2006 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28 (4):595-610.
    I present a reconstruction of F.H.C. Crick's two 1957 hypotheses "Sequence Hypothesis" and "Central Dogma" in terms of a contemporary philosophical theory of causation. Analyzing in particular the experimental evidence that Crick cited, I argue that these hypotheses can be understood as claims about the actual difference-making cause in protein synthesis. As these hypotheses are only true if restricted to certain nucleic acids in certain organisms, I then examine the concept of causal specificity and its potential to counter claims about (...)
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  • The triple helix: gene, organism, and environment.Richard C. Lewontin - 2000 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edited by Richard C. Lewontin.
    One of our most brilliant evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin has also been a leading critic of those--scientists and non-scientists alike--who would misuse the science to which he has contributed so much. In The Triple Helix, Lewontin the scientist and Lewontin the critic come together to provide a concise, accessible account of what his work has taught him about biology and about its relevance to human affairs. In the process, he exposes some of the common and troubling misconceptions that misdirect and (...)
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  • Normality as a biological concept.Robert Wachbroit - 1994 - Philosophy of Science 61 (4):579-591.
    The biological sciences employ a concept of normality that must be distinguished from statistical or value concepts. The concept of normality is presupposed in the standard explications of biological functions, and it is crucial to the strategy of explanation by approximations in, for example, physiology. Nevertheless, this concept of normality does not seem to be captured in the language of physics. Thus attempts at explaining the methodological relationship between the biological sciences and the physical sciences by concentrating only on the (...)
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  • Discussion: Three Ways to Misunderstand Developmental Systems Theory.Paul E. Griffiths & Russell D. Gray - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):417-425.
    Developmental systems theory (DST) is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology (EDB). The contributions to this literature by evolutionary developmental biologists contain three important misunderstandings of DST.
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  • Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation.P. E. Griffiths & R. D. Gray - 1994 - Journal of Philosophy 91 (6):277-304.
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  • Genetics and philosophy : an introduction.Paul Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2013 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    In the past century, nearly all of the biological sciences have been directly affected by discoveries and developments in genetics, a fast-evolving subject with important theoretical dimensions. In this rich and accessible book, Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz show how the concept of the gene has evolved and diversified across the many fields that make up modern biology. By examining the molecular biology of the 'environment', they situate genetics in the developmental biology of whole organisms, and reveal how the molecular (...)
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  • Evo-devo, devo-evo, and devgen-popgen.Scott F. Gilbert - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (2):347-352.
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  • The phenomena of homology.Paul Edmund Griffiths - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (5):643-658.
    Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Twenty years ago the ‘new experimentalist’ movement (...)
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  • Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.[author unknown] - 2013
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  • Discussion: Three ways to misunderstand developmental systems theory.P. Griffiths - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):417-425.
    Developmental systems theory is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology. The contributions to this literature by evolutionary developmental biologists contain three important misunderstandings of DST.
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  • In pursuit of a science of agriculture: the role of statistics in field experiments.Giuditta Parolini - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (3):261-281.
    Since the beginning of the twentieth century statistics has reshaped the experimental cultures of agricultural research taking part in the subtle dialectic between the epistemic and the material that is proper to experimental systems. This transformation has become especially relevant in field trials and the paper will examine the British agricultural institution, Rothamsted Experimental Station, where statistical methods nowadays popular in the planning and analysis of field experiments were developed in the 1920s. At Rothamsted statistics promoted randomisation over systematic arrangements, (...)
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  • The erotetic organization of developmental biology.A. C. Love - 2014 - In Alessandro Minelli & Thomas Pradeu (eds.), Towards a Theory of Development. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 33–55.
    Developmental biology is the science of explaining how a variety of interacting processes generate the heterogeneous shapes, size, and structural features of an organism as it develops rom embryo to adult, or more generally throughout its life cycle (Love, 2008b; Minelli, 2011a). Although it is commonplace in philosophy to associate sciences with theories such that the individuation of a science is dependent on a constitutive theory or group of models, it is uncommon to find presentations of developmental biology making reference (...)
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  • Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution.Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray (eds.) - 2001 - MIT Press.
    The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from (...)
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  • The resisted rise of randomisation in experimental design: British agricultural science, c.1910–1930.Dominic Berry - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (3):242-260.
    The most conspicuous form of agricultural experiment is the field trial, and within the history of such trials, the arrival of the randomised control trial is considered revolutionary. Originating with R.A. Fisher within British agricultural science in the 1920s and 30s, the RCT has since become one of the most prodigiously used experimental techniques throughout the natural and social sciences. Philosophers of science have already scrutinised the epistemological uniqueness of RCTs, undermining their status as the ‘gold standard’ in experimental design. (...)
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  • Carl Linnaeus's botanical paper slips (1767–1773).Isabelle Charmantier & Staffan Müller-Wille - 2014 - Intellectual History Review 24 (2):215-238.
    The development of paper-based information technologies in the early modern period is a field of enquiry that has lately benefited from extensive studies by intellectual historians and historians o...
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  • Regenerating theories in developmental biology.Thomas Pradeu - forthcoming - Towards a Theory of Development:15.
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  • Bio-ontologies as tools for integration in biology.Sabina Leonelli - 2008 - Biological Theory 3 (1):7-11.
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  • The Epistemology of Development, Evolution, and Genetics.Richard Burian - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Collected for the first time in a single volume are essays which examine the developments in three fundamental biological disciplines - embryology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. These disciplines were in conflict for much of the twentieth century and the essays in this collection examine key methodological problems within these disciplines and the difficulties faced in overcoming the conflicts between them. Burian skilfully weaves together historical appreciation of the settings within which scientists work, substantial knowledge of the biological problems at stake (...)
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  • From machine-theory to entelechy: Two studies in developmental teleology.Frederick B. Churchill - 1969 - Journal of the History of Biology 2 (1):165-185.
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  • The Use of Natural Kinds in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.Jessica Bolker - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (2):121-129.
    Evolutionary developmental biologists categorize many different kinds of things, from ontogenetic stages to modules of gene activity. The process of categorization—the establishment of “kinds”—is an implicit part of describing the natural world in consistent, useful ways, and has an essentially practical rather than philosophical basis. Kinds commonly serve one of three purposes: they may function (1) as practical tools for communication; (2) to support prediction and generalization; or (3) as a basis for theoretical discussions. Beyond the minimal requirement that classifications (...)
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  • Emerging sciences and new conceptions of disease; or, beyond the monogenomic differentiated cell lineage.John Dupré - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1 (1):119-131.
    This paper will begin with some very broad and general considerations about the kind of biological entities we are. This exercise is motivated by the belief that the view of what we—multicellular eukaryotic organisms—are that is widely assumed by biologists, medical scientists and the general public, is an extremely limited one. It cannot be assumed a priori that a more sophisticated view will make a major difference to the science or practice of medicine, and there are areas of medicine to (...)
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