Results for 'Biological Theory'

945 found
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  1. The Structure of Idealization in Biological Theories: The Case of the Wright-Fisher Model.Donato Rodriguez Xavier & Arroyo-Santos Alfonso - 2012 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 43 (1):11-27.
    In this paper we present a new framework of idealization in biology. We characterize idealizations as a network of counterfactual and hypothetical conditionals that can exhibit different “degrees of contingency”. We use this idea to say that, in departing more or less from the actual world, idealizations can serve numerous epistemic, methodological or heuristic purposes within scientific research. We defend that, in part, this structure explains why idealizations, despite being deformations of reality, are so successful in scientific practice. For illustrative (...)
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  2. Mechanism schemas and the relationship between biological theories.Tudor M. Baetu - 2011 - In Phyllis McKay Illari Federica Russo (ed.), Causality in the Sciences. Oxford University Press.
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  3. The spandrels of self-deception: Prospects for a biological theory of a mental phenomenon.Neil Van Leeuwen - 2007 - Philosophical Psychology 20 (3):329 – 348.
    Three puzzles about self-deception make this mental phenomenon an intriguing explanatory target. The first relates to how to define it without paradox; the second is about how to make sense of self-deception in light of the interpretive view of the mental that has become widespread in philosophy; and the third concerns why it exists at all. In this paper I address the first and third puzzles. First, I define self-deception. Second, I criticize Robert Trivers' attempt to use adaptionist evolutionary psychology (...)
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  4. (1 other version)Biological Atomism and Cell Theory.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (3):202-211.
    Biological atomism postulates that all life is composed of elementary and indivisible vital units. The activity of a living organism is thus conceived as the result of the activities and interactions of its elementary constituents, each of which individually already exhibits all the attributes proper to life. This paper surveys some of the key episodes in the history of biological atomism, and situates cell theory within this tradition. The atomistic foundations of cell theory are subsequently dissected (...)
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  5. Clarifying The Interface Theory of Perception Using The Biological Framework.Ronald Williams - manuscript
    This essay explains Donald Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception using The Biological Framework for a Mathematical Universe proposed by Ronald Williams. According to Hoffman, what we perceive is more like a “desktop interface with icons representing complex underlying processes, rather than a direct window into the true nature of the world." The theory of a biological framework for a mathematical universes suggests that these complex underlying processes of “the desktop interface with icons” contain correspondences to (...) systems. For example, “the desktop icons” of the ocean’s arctic currents and the melting and freezing of Antartica contain “complex underlying processes” which mirror the processes of a circulatory system and beating heart. While indeed we do interpret reality from a superficial perspective as Hoffman suggests, our cognitive abilities are enhanced enough to recognize correspondences to these patterns pertaining to these biological systems which reveal the true nature of the world/universe/reality and thus highlight our evolved perceptual systems which can enable us how to recognize these patterns and organize ourselves to them in order to best survive it. Another example of a “desktop icon” is human society—the order and properties of human society contain “complex underlying processes” that are analogous to the order and properties of cellular society—thus “socioeconomic problems” can be understood through cellular economic problems. Moreover, the solution to the cellular economic problem is the solution to the socioeconomic problem. (shrink)
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  6. How Biology Became Social and What It Means for Social Theory.Maurizio Meloni - 2014 - The Sociological Review 62:593-614.
    In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor (...)
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  7. Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation.Pablo Lorenzano - 2020 - In Lorenzo Baravalle & Luciana Zaterka (eds.), Life and Evolution, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. pp. 163-207.
    Three metascientific concepts that have been object of philosophical analysis are the concepts oflaw, model and theory. The aim ofthis article is to present the explication of these concepts, and of their relationships, made within the framework of Sneedean or Metatheoretical Structuralism (Balzer et al. 1987), and of their application to a case from the realm of biology: Population Dynamics. The analysis carried out will make it possible to support, contrary to what some philosophers of science in general and (...)
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  8. Biology and Theology in Malebranche's Theory of Organic Generation.Karen Detlefsen - 2014 - In Ohad Nachtomy & Justin E. H. Smith (eds.), The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Oup Usa. pp. 137-156.
    This paper has two parts: In the first part, I give a general survey of the various reasons 17th and 18th century life scientists and metaphysicians endorsed the theory of pre-existence according to which God created all living beings at the creation of the universe, and no living beings are ever naturally generated anew. These reasons generally fall into three categories. The first category is theological. For example, many had the desire to account for how all humans are stained (...)
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  9. The Multiple Realizability of Biological Individuals.Ellen Clarke - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy 110 (8):413-435.
    Biological theory demands a clear organism concept, but at present biologists cannot agree on one. They know that counting particular units, and not counting others, allows them to generate explanatory and predictive descriptions of evolutionary processes. Yet they lack a unified theory telling them which units to count. In this paper, I offer a novel account of biological individuality, which reconciles conflicting definitions of ‘organism’ by interpreting them as describing alternative realisers of a common functional role, (...)
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  10. A theory of biological pattern formation.Alfred Gierer & Hans Meinhardt - 1972 - Kybernetik, Continued as Biological Cybernetics 12 (1):30 - 39.
    The paper addresses the formation of striking patterns within originally near-homogenous tissue, the process prototypical for embryology, and represented in particularly purist form by cut sections of hydra regenerating, by internal reorganisation of the pre-existing tissue, a complete animal with head and foot. The essential requirements are autocatalytic, self-enhancing activation, combined with inhibitory or depletion effects of wider range – “lateral inhibition”. Not only de-novo-pattern formation, but also well known, striking features of developmental regulation such as induction, inhibition, and proportion (...)
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  11. Measurement in biology is methodized by theory.Maël Montévil - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (3):35.
    We characterize access to empirical objects in biology from a theoretical perspective. Unlike objects in current physical theories, biological objects are the result of a history and their variations continue to generate a history. This property is the starting point of our concept of measurement. We argue that biological measurement is relative to a natural history which is shared by the different objects subjected to the measurement and is more or less constrained by biologists. We call symmetrization the (...)
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  12. Reflections on a theory of organisms: holism in biology.Walter M. Elsasser - 1987 - Baltimore, Md: Published for the Johns Hopkins Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
    Are living organisms--as Descartes argued--just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought-provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico-chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution, Elsasser lays the foundation for a theoretical biology that points the way toward a (...)
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  13. ‘On the Different Ways of ‘‘Doing Theory’’ in Biology‘.Massimo Pigliucci - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (4): 287-297.
    ‘‘Theoretical biology’’ is a surprisingly heter- ogeneous field, partly because it encompasses ‘‘doing the- ory’’ across disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, it is done in a stunning variety of different ways, using anything from formal analytical models to computer sim- ulations, from graphic representations to verbal arguments. In this essay I survey a number of aspects of what it means to do theoretical biology, and how they compare with the allegedly much more restricted (...)
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  14. Parts and theories in compositional biology.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (4):471-499.
    I analyze the importance of parts in the style of biological theorizing that I call compositional biology. I do this by investigating various aspects, including partitioning frames and explanatory accounts, of the theoretical perspectives that fall under and are guided by compositional biology. I ground this general examination in a comparative analysis of three different disciplines with their associated compositional theoretical perspectives: comparative morphology, functional morphology, and developmental biology. I glean data for this analysis from canonical textbooks and defend (...)
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  15. The Meaning of “Theory” in Biology.Massimo Pigliucci, Kim Sterelny & Werner Callebaut - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (4):285-286.
    The articles in this issue reflect the results of the 25th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology on ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Theory’ in Biology’’ held at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria, 30 June–3 July, 2011.
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  16. A Unifying Theory of Biological Function.J. H. van Hateren - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (2):112-126.
    A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system. The new proposal unifies the key notions of both kinds of theories, but goes beyond them by explaining how functions in an organism can exist as factors with autonomous causal efficacy. The goal-directedness (...)
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  17. Biological normativity: a new hope for naturalism?Walter Veit - 2021 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24 (2):291-301.
    Since Boorse [Philos Sci 44(4):542–573, 1977] published his paper “Health as a theoretical concept” one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘value-laden’. Due to the apparent ‘failure’ of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativist accounts, much in the recent literature has appealed to more conciliatory approaches or so-called ‘hybrid accounts’ of health and disease. A recent paper by Matthewson (...)
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  18. Coordination in theory extension: How Reichenbach can help us understand endogenization in evolutionary biology.Michele Luchetti - 2021 - Synthese (3-4):1-26.
    Reichenbach’s early solution to the scientific problem of how abstract mathematical representations can successfully express real phenomena is rooted in his view of coordination. In this paper, I claim that a Reichenbach-inspired, ‘layered’ view of coordination provides us with an effective tool to systematically analyse some epistemic and conceptual intricacies resulting from a widespread theorising strategy in evolutionary biology, recently discussed by Okasha (2018) as ‘endogenization’. First, I argue that endogenization is a form of extension of natural selection theory (...)
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  19. Trends in Theoretical Biology: the 20th Century.Kalevi Kull - 2000 - Aquinas 43 (2):235-250.
    The paper examines the main trends in the search for a theory of general biology throughout the 20th century — the physicalization on one hand, and the semiotization on the other. These two approaches had their predecessors and were formed already in the 19th century biology, as Darwinian and Baerian biology. In theoretical biology, there are co-existing (however, asymmetrical) trends toward specifying solutions and generalizing axioms. The inclusion of the biological organism as a subject into biological (...) requires an analysis of the concept of scientific fact. A cross-disciplinary typology of facts on the basis of their invariant features is provided. The main periods of development of theoretical biology are briefly characterised, and the trend towards the theory of biological communication and meaning outlined. (shrink)
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  20. Are biological traits explained by their 'selected effect' functions?Joshua R. Christie, Carl Brusse, Pierrick Bourrat, Peter Takacs & Paul Edmund Griffiths - forthcoming - Australasian Philosophical Review.
    The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents (...)
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  21. Serial Endosymbiosis Theory: From biology to astronomy and back to the origin of life.Predrag Slijepcevic - forthcoming - Biosystems.
    Serial Endosymbiosis Theory, or SET, was conceived and developed by Lynn Margulis, to explain the greatest discontinuity in the history of life, the origin of eukaryotic cells. Some predictions of SET, namely the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts, withstood the test of the most recent evidence from a variety of disciplines including phylogenetics, biochemistry, and cell biology. Even though some other predictions fared less well, SET remains a seminal theory in biology. In this paper, I focus on two (...)
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  22. Why Biology is Beyond Physical Sciences?Bhakti Niskama Shanta & Bhakti Vijnana Muni - 2016 - Advances in Life Sciences 6 (1):13-30.
    In the framework of materialism, the major attention is to find general organizational laws stimulated by physical sciences, ignoring the uniqueness of Life. The main goal of materialism is to reduce consciousness to natural processes, which in turn can be translated into the language of math, physics and chemistry. Following this approach, scientists have made several attempts to deny the living organism of its veracity as an immortal soul, in favor of genes, molecules, atoms and so on. However, advancement in (...)
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  23. Mental Representations and Millikan’s Theory of Intentional Content: Does Biology Chase Causality?Robert D. Rupert - 1999 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1):113-140.
    In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to (...)
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  24. Biosemiosis and Causation: Defending Biosemiotics Through Rosen's Theoretical Biology, or, Integrating Biosemiotics and Anticipatory Systems Theory.Arran Gare - 2019 - Cosmos and History 19 (1):31-90.
    The fracture in the emerging discipline of biosemiotics when the code biologist Marcello Barbieri claimed that Peircian biosemiotics is not genuine science raises anew the question: What is science? When it comes to radically new approaches in science, there is no simple answer to this question, because if successful, these new approaches change what is understood to be science. This is what Galileo, Darwin and Einstein did to science, and with quantum theory, opposing interpretations are not merely about what (...)
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  25. A Biologically Informed Hylomorphism.Christopher J. Austin - 2017 - In William M. R. Simpson, Robert Charles Koons & Nicholas Teh (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 185-210.
    Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention – the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between (...)
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  26. Standard Aberration: Cancer Biology and the Modeling Account of Normal Function.Seth Goldwasser - 2023 - Biology and Philosophy 38 (1):(4) 1-33.
    Cancer biology features the ascription of normal functions to parts of cancers. At least some ascriptions of function in cancer biology track local normality of parts within the global abnormality of the aberration to which those parts belong. That is, cancer biologists identify as functions activities that, in some sense, parts of cancers are supposed to perform, despite cancers themselves having no purpose. The present paper provides a theory to accommodate these normal function ascriptions—I call it the Modeling Account (...)
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  27. Beyond Quantum Theory: A Realist Psycho-Biological Interpretation of Physical Reality.Michael Conrad, D. Home & Brian Josephson - 1988 - In A. van der Marwe, F. Selleri & G. Tarozzi (eds.), Microphysical Reality and Quantum Formalism, Vol. I. Kluwer Academic. pp. 285-293.
    Stapp and others have proposed that reality involves a fundamental life process, or creative process. It is shown how this process description may be unified with the description that derives from quantum physics. The methods of the quantum physicist and of the biological sciences are seen to be two alternative approaches to the understanding of nature, involving two distinct modes of description which can usefully supplement each other, and neither on its own contains the full story. The unified view (...)
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  28. Biology's last paradigm shift. The transition from natural theology to Darwinism.Massimo Pigliucci - 2012 - Paradigmi 2012 (3):45-58.
    The theory of evolution, which provides the conceptual framework for all modern research in organismal biology and informs research in molecular bi- ology, has gone through several stages of expansion and refinement. Darwin and Wallace (1858) of course proposed the original idea, centering on the twin concepts of natural selection and common descent. Shortly thereafter, Wallace and August Weismann worked toward the complete elimination of any Lamarckian vestiges from the theory, leaning in particular on Weismann’s (1893) concept of (...)
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  29. How Biological Technology Should Inform the Causal Selection Debate.Janella Baxter - 2019 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 11.
    Waters’s (2007) actual difference making and Weber’s (2013, 2017) biological normality approaches to causal selection have received many criticisms, some of which miss their target. Disagreement about whether Waters’s and Weber’s views succeed in providing criteria that uniquely singles out the gene as explanatorily significant in biology has led philosophers to overlook a prior problem. Before one can address whether Waters’s and Weber’s views successfully account for the explanatory significance of genes, one must ask whether either view satisfactorily meets (...)
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  30. Biological constraints as norms in evolution.Mathilde Tahar - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (1):1-21.
    Biology seems to present local and transitory regularities rather than immutable laws. To account for these historically constituted regularities and to distinguish them from mathematical invariants, Montévil and Mossio (Journal of Theoretical Biology 372:179–191, 2015) have proposed to speak of constraints. In this article we analyse the causal power of these constraints in the evolution of biodiversity, i.e., their positivity, but also the modality of their action on the directions taken by evolution. We argue that to fully account for the (...)
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  31. Defusing Ideological Defenses in Biology.Angela Potochnik - 2013 - BioScience 63 (2):118-123.
    Ideological language is widespread in theoretical biology. Evolutionary game theory has been defended as a worldview and a leap of faith, and sexual selection theory has been criticized for what it posits as basic to biological nature. Views such as these encourage the impression of ideological rifts in the field. I advocate an alternative interpretation, whereby many disagreements between different camps of biologists merely reflect methodological differences. This interpretation provides a more accurate and more optimistic account of (...)
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  32. The Return of the Organism as a Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (5):347-359.
    Although it may seem like a truism to assert that biology is the science that studies organisms, during the second half of the twentieth century the organism category disappeared from biological theory. Over the past decade, however, biology has begun to witness the return of the organism as a fundamental explanatory concept. There are three major causes: (a) the realization that the Modern Synthesis does not provide a fully satisfactory understanding of evolution; (b) the growing awareness of the (...)
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  33. Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of 'Race'.Jonathan Michael Kaplan & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (1):401-412.
    It is illegitimate to read any ontology about "race" off of biological theory or data. Indeed, the technical meaning of "genetic variation" is fluid, and there is no single theoretical agreed-upon criterion for defining and distinguishing populations (or groups or clusters) given a particular set of genetic variation data. Thus, by analyzing three formal senses of "genetic variation"—diversity, differentiation, and heterozygosity—we argue that the use of biological theory for making epistemic claims about "race" can only seem (...)
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  34. Biological Autonomy.Attila Grandpierre & Menas Kafatos - 2012 - Philosophy Study 2 (9):631-649.
    We argue that genuine biological autonomy, or described at human level as free will, requires taking into account quantum vacuum processes in the context of biological teleology. One faces at least three basic problems of genuine biological autonomy: (1) if biological autonomy is not physical, where does it come from? (2) Is there a room for biological causes? And (3) how to obtain a workable model of biological teleology? It is shown here that the (...)
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  35. (1 other version)Biology and Theology in Aristotle's Theoretical and Practical Sciences.Monte Johnson - 2021 - In Sophia M. Connell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Biology. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 12-29.
    Biology and theology are interdependent theoretical sciences for Aristotle. In prominent discussions of the divine things (the stars and their unmoved movers) Aristotle appeals to the science of living things, and in prominent discussions of the nature of plants and animals Aristotle appeals to the nature of the divine. There is in fact a single continuous series of living things that includes gods, humans, animals, and plants, all of them in a way divine. Aristotle has this continuum of divine beings, (...)
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  36. Understanding Biology in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.Adham El Shazly, Elsa Lawerence, Srijit Seal, Chaitanya Joshi, Matthew Greening, Pietro Lio, Shantung Singh, Andreas Bender & Pietro Sormanni - manuscript
    Modern life sciences research is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to model biological systems, primarily centered around the use of machine learning (ML) models. Although ML is undeniably useful for identifying patterns in large, complex data sets, its widespread application in biological sciences represents a significant deviation from traditional methods of scientific inquiry. As such, the interplay between these models and scientific understanding in biology is a topic with important implications for the future of scientific research, (...)
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  37. A Biological Alternative to Moral Explanations.Joseph Millum - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):385-407.
    Some moral realists claim that moral facts are a species of natural fact, amenable to scientific investigation. They argue that these moral facts are needed in the best explanations of certain phenomena and that this is evidence that they are real. In this paper I present part of a biological account of the function of morality. The account allows the identification of a plausible natural kind that could play the explanatory role that a moral kind would play in naturalist (...)
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  38. Possibility spaces and the notion of novelty: from music to biology.Maël Montévil - 2019 - Synthese 196 (11):4555-4581.
    We provide a new perspective on the relation between the space of description of an object and the appearance of novelties. One of the aims of this perspective is to facilitate the interaction between mathematics and historical sciences. The definition of novelties is paradoxical: if one can define in advance the possibles, then they are not genuinely new. By analyzing the situation in set theory, we show that defining generic (i.e., shared) and specific (i.e., individual) properties of elements of (...)
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  39. Circularities, Organizations, and Constraints in Biology and Systems Theory.Leonardo Bich - 2016 - Constructivist Foundations 12 (1):14-16.
    Open peer commentary on the article “Circularity and the Micro-Macro-Difference” by Manfred Füllsack. Upshot: The target article defends the fundamental role of circularity for systems sciences and the necessity to develop a conceptual and methodological approach to it. The concept of circularity, however, is multifarious, and two of the main challenges in this respect are to provide distinctions between different forms of circularities and explore in detail the roles they play in organizations. This commentary provides some suggestions in this direction (...)
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  40. Object spaces: An organizing strategy for biological theorizing.Beckett Sterner - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (3):280-286.
    A classic analytic approach to biological phenomena seeks to refine definitions until classes are sufficiently homogenous to support prediction and explanation, but this approach founders on cases where a single process produces objects with similar forms but heterogeneous behaviors. I introduce object spaces as a tool to tackle this challenging diversity of biological objects in terms of causal processes with well-defined formal properties. Object spaces have three primary components: (1) a combinatorial biological process such as protein synthesis (...)
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  41. (Un)Easily Possible Synthetic Biology.Tarja Knuuttila & Andrea Loettgers - 2022 - Philosophy of Science (5):1-14.
    Synthetic biology has a strong modal dimension that is part and parcel of its engineering agenda. In turning hypothetical biological designs into actual synthetic constructs, synthetic biologists reach towards potential biology instead of concentrating on naturally evolved organisms. We analyze synthetic biology’s goal of making biology easier to engineer through the combinatorial theory of possibility, which reduces possibility to combinations of individuals and their attributes in the actual world. While the last decades of synthetic biology explorations have shown (...)
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  42. Can synthetic biology shed light on the origin of life?Christophe Malaterre - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (4):357-367.
    It is a most commonly accepted hypothesis that life originated from inanimate matter, somehow being a synthetic product of organic aggregates, and as such, a result of some sort of prebiotic synthetic biology. In the past decades, the newly formed scientific discipline of synthetic biology has set ambitious goals by pursuing the complete design and production of genetic circuits, entire genomes or even whole organisms. In this paper, I argue that synthetic biology might also shed some novel and interesting perspectives (...)
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  43. A Modal Theory of Function.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Journal of Philosophy 107 (8):412-431.
    The function of a trait token is usually defined in terms of some properties of other (past, present, future) tokens of the same trait type. I argue that this strategy is problematic, as trait types are (at least partly) individuated by their functional properties, which would lead to circularity. In order to avoid this problem, I suggest a way to define the function of a trait token in terms of the properties of the very same trait token. To able to (...)
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  44. Kabbalah: Revealing Pnimiyut and Chitzoniyut's Connection to Biology.Ronald Williams - manuscript
    The theory proposing a biological framework for a mathematical universe hypothesis posits that biological patterns define the fundamental nature of reality. These biological patterns are initially hidden from view, but can only be unveiled and understood through the knowledge of biology’s patterns and structurally mapping correspondences from the biological domain to a target domain. This perspective aligns with the ideas establishing perennial wisdom, a concept that encompasses universal and timeless spiritual truths found across various traditions. (...)
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  45. Causal graphs and biological mechanisms.Alexander Gebharter & Marie I. Kaiser - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 55-86.
    Modeling mechanisms is central to the biological sciences – for purposes of explanation, prediction, extrapolation, and manipulation. A closer look at the philosophical literature reveals that mechanisms are predominantly modeled in a purely qualitative way. That is, mechanistic models are conceived of as representing how certain entities and activities are spatially and temporally organized so that they bring about the behavior of the mechanism in question. Although this adequately characterizes how mechanisms are represented in biology textbooks, contemporary biological (...)
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  46. Biological Explanation.Angela Potochnik - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 49-65.
    One of the central aims of science is explanation: scientists seek to uncover why things happen the way they do. This chapter addresses what kinds of explanations are formulated in biology, how explanatory aims influence other features of the field of biology, and the implications of all of this for biology education. Philosophical treatments of scientific explanation have been both complicated and enriched by attention to explanatory strategies in biology. Most basically, whereas traditional philosophy of science based explanation on derivation (...)
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  47. Holistic biology: Back on stage? Comments on post-genomics in historical perspective.Alfred Gierer - 2002 - Philosophia Naturalis 39 (1):25-44.
    A strong motivation for the human genome project was to relate biological features to the structure and function of small sets of genes, and ideally to individual genes. However, it is now increasingly realized that many problems require a "systems" approach emphasizing the interplay of large numbers of genes, and the involvement of complex networks of gene regulation. This implies a new emphasis on integrative, systems theoretical approaches. It may be called 'holistic' if the term is used without irrational (...)
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  48. Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Knowledge.Christophe Malaterre - 2013 - Biological Theory (8):346–356.
    Probably the most distinctive feature of synthetic biology is its being “synthetic” in some sense or another. For some, synthesis plays a unique role in the production of knowledge that is most distinct from that played by analysis: it is claimed to deliver knowledge that would otherwise not be attained. In this contribution, my aim is to explore how synthetic biology delivers knowledge via synthesis, and to assess the extent to which this knowledge is distinctly synthetic. On the basis of (...)
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  49. Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory.Paul Edmund Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245.
    Griffiths and Russell D. Gray (1994, 1997, 2001) have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process – the life cycle – and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, both also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in more depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour treating (...)
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  50. Ina Goy and Eric Watkins, eds. Kant’s Theory of Biology (De Gruyter, 2014). [REVIEW]Jennifer Mensch - 2015 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (2):367-370.
    This edited collection began as an international symposium on Kant and biology held at the University of Tübingen in 2010 and the now-published volume offers us new ways of thinking about Kant’s theory of biology with respect to not only his own work but to contemporary discussions regarding biological function and form. With a consistently high level of scholarship and a set of internationally renowned contributors, Kant’s Theory of Biology thus offers us an important contribution to the (...)
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